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 region is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium.

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.

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.

The contributions from ASM are substantial, including 26 percent of the global supply of tantalum, 25 percent of tin and gold, 20 percent of diamonds, 80 percent of sapphires, and up to 30 percent of cobalt.3

The country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, offered the nation a glimpse of a future in which the Congolese people could determine their own fates, use the nation’s resources for the benefit of the masses, and reject the interference of foreign powers that sought to continue exploiting the country’s resources.

The truth, however, was this—but for the demand for sugar and the immense profits accrued through the sale of it, the entire slavery-for-sugar economy would not have existed. Furthermore, the inevitable outcome of stripping humans of their dignity, security, wages, and freedom can only be a system that results in the complete dehumanization of the people exploited at the bottom of the chain.

Kolwezi is tucked in the hazy hills of the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although most people have never heard of Kolwezi, billions of people could not conduct their daily lives without this city.

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.

In 2021, a total of 111,750 tons of cobalt representing 72 percent of the global supply was mined in the DRC,

The interior is mostly a magnificent and healthy country of unspeakable richness. I have a small specimen of good coal; other minerals such as gold, copper, iron and silver are abundant, and I am confident that with a wise and liberal (not lavish) expenditure of capital, one of the greatest systems of inland navigation in the world might be utilized, and from 30 months to 36 months begin to repay any enterprising capitalist that might take the matter in hand.2

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.

Education is supposed to be funded by the state until eighteen years of age, but schools and teachers are under-supported and forced to charge fees of five or six dollars per month to cover expenses, a sum that millions of people in the DRC cannot afford.

Fully refined cobalt is combined with other metals to make cathodes—the positively charged part of a battery. The largest lithium-ion battery manufacturers in the world are CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.6 Most of the cobalt in these batteries originated in the Congo.

According to Central African geology expert Murray Hitzman, the reason the copper-cobalt deposits in the Copper Belt are so shallow is because they are uniquely found in “sediment hosted stratiform deposits.” This type of deposit indicates that the cobalt-containing ores occur in discrete layers of sedimentary rocks that were initially laid down in water. Such deposits are the only ones with the potential to be pushed upward to the surface by tectonic activity, thereby making them accessible to artisanal miners.

Add in laptops, e-scooters, e-bikes, and other rechargeable consumer electronic devices, and the aggregate amount of cobalt needed from all devices, save those with four or more tires, adds up to tens of thousands of tons each year. The EV market, however, is where cobalt demand has really exploded. The first rechargeable electric vehicle was invented in 1880s, but it was not until the early 1900s that electric vehicles were being produced on a commercial scale. By 1910, around 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were propelled by electric engines.

The EV30@30 target would require a global stock of 230 million EVs by 2030, a fourteen-fold increase over 2021 numbers.8 EV sales could end up being even greater, as twenty-four nations pledged at COP26 to eliminate the sale of gas-powered vehicles entirely by 2040. Millions of tons of cobalt will be needed, which will continue to push hundreds of thousands of Congolese women, men, and children into hazardous pits and tunnels to help meet demand.

LCO batteries provide high energy density, which allows them to store more power per weight of battery. This quality makes them ideal for use in consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. The tradeoff is that LCO batteries have shorter life spans and deliver a lower amount of power, qualities that make them unsuitable for use in electric vehicles. L-NMC batteries are used in most electric vehicles, except for Tesla, which uses L-NCA batteries. Since 2015, the trend with these batteries has been to reduce cobalt reliance by moving toward higher ratios of nickel.11 Nickel has lower thermal stability than cobalt, so the higher the ratio of nickel used, the lower the battery’s stability and safety.

Makaza said that he typically produced between forty and fifty kilograms of heterogenite each day by digging in the large pits or along the pit walls, for which he was paid 2,000–2,500 Congolese francs (CF) (about $1.10–$1.40). I asked who exactly paid him, and Makaza said, “The men from CHEMAF.” Makaza lamented that the paltry income was insufficient to meet his family’s needs.

Let’s say in eighty-five percent of the major mining contracts you will always find a Chinese company behind the deal. Most of these deals lacked transparency. Their modus operandi was to ensure that nothing would be published in terms of these contracts. There were a lot of bribes going around in the last regime to make this happen. We want to publish the details of these agreements so we can hold the Chinese companies accountable.

“There are three different permits required for transporting ore. The price depends on how much ore is being transported and the distance it is transported. Négociants must pay something like eighty or one hundred dollars per year to transport one ton of ore no more than ten kilometers. A comptoir will have to transport many tons of ore, and maybe the distances could be up to fifty kilometers.

The mining companies must transport thousands of tons, and it could be more than three hundred kilometers if they are traveling from Kolwezi to Kipushi, so the fee in this case can be thousands of dollars each year.”

The négociants that came to the site paid 5,000 Congolese francs per sack, or about $2.80. This payment implied an income of roughly $1.05 per team member per day. The children did not actually receive any money; they simply worked to help the family. The heterogenite in Kipushi had a cobalt grade of 1 percent or less, which was much lower than the heterogenite closer to Kolwezi, where cobalt grades could exceed 10 percent.

At the end of the day, the women helped each other to haul their fifty-kilogram sacks about a kilometer to the front of the site where négociants purchased each from them for around $0.80. Priscille said that she had no family and lived in a small hut on her own. Her husband used to work at this site with her, but he died a year ago from a respiratory illness. They tried to have children, but she miscarried twice. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”

According to Philippe, there were two main mining companies that bought the heterogenite from Kipushi—Congo DongFang Mining and CHEMAF. Both companies had cobalt processing facilities in Lubumbashi, and both happened to operate the only two “model sites” for artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC.

The négociants at Kipushi paid Faustin about $2.80 per sack. Authorization to transport ore and a means of conveyance meant that the négociants operating in Kipushi were able to retain almost 40 percent of the value of each sack of heterogenite. It seemed a needless layer in the supply chain that shifted value away from the people who worked the hardest. For that matter, the depots equally seemed to be a needless layer in the supply chain, siphoning yet more value out of the system by providing an informal and untraceable entry point for artisanal cobalt into the formal supply chain. There was nothing to stop mining companies from going to the artisanal sites themselves and directly paying the women, men, and children who dug their cobalt—aside from the negative optics associated with having direct links to hazardous, penny-wage artisanal mining areas teeming with children.

In the studies we conducted, the artisanal miners have more than forty times the amount of cobalt in their urine as the control groups. They also have five times the level of lead and four times the level of uranium. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.

Contamination by heavy metals of the local population and the food supply was causing a range of negative health consequences across the Copper Belt. For instance, Germain had recently documented a high rate of birth defects in mining communities, such as holoprosencephaly, agnathia otocephaly, stillbirth, miscarriages, and low birth weight.10 Germain said that in most cases, the child’s father had been working as an artisanal miner at the time of conception and that samples of cord blood taken at birth revealed high levels of cobalt, arsenic, and uranium. Respiratory ailments were also common—“Inhalation of cobalt dust causes ‘hard metal lung disease’ which can be fatal,” Germain said. “Also, prolonged contact with cobalt by the artisanal miners can cause them to suffer acute dermatitis.”

By way of comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States recommends a maximum safe limit of 40 micrograms of lead per square foot inside homes. Levels as high as 170 micrograms per square foot can cause neurological damage, muscle and joint pain, headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, and reduced fertility in adults.

The mining companies do not control the runoff of effluents from their processing operations. They do not clean up when they have chemical spills. Toxic dust and gases from mining plants and diesel equipment spreads for many kilometers and are inhaled by the local population. The mining companies have polluted the entire region. All the crops, animals, and fish stocks are contaminated.

I knew from meeting just a few people like Makaza at Mukwemba that conflict resolution on land disputes was an important initiative, although I never heard of a single case in which the dispute had been resolved in a manner that was favorable for the displaced people.

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.

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.

“There is an agenda to promote a false picture of the conditions here. The mining companies claim there are not any problems here. They say they maintain international standards. Everyone believes them, so nothing changes.”

According to a mid-level manager at Congo DongFang Mining (CDM) who goes by the name of Hu, the people of the Congo, and Africa more generally, suffer exploitation because they are lazy.

They also discovered

uranium on April 11, 1915. The deposits had an average concentration of 65 percent U308 (triuranium octoxide), making it the highest-grade source of uranium in the world at the time. UMHK promptly built a uranium mine called Shinkolobwe southwest of Likasi. The global market for uranium in the 1920s was limited to use in pigments for ceramics, not unlike cobalt, so the mine was not nearly as profitable as the nearby copper mines and was ultimately closed in 1937. Soon after, the Manhattan Project identified Shinkolobwe as the ideal source for the high-grade uranium required to build an atomic bomb. On September 18, 1942, at an office in Midtown Manhattan, the owners of UMHK agreed to sell uranium from Shinkolobwe to the U.S. Army for around one dollar per pound. Shinkolobwe provided roughly 75 percent of the uranium that was used for the bombs dropped from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.1

Kiyonge showed us the hut in which he and his three brothers lived. It was a thatched structure with a plastic sheet tied on top as a makeshift roof. Shorts and shirts were hanging to dry on a string. Inside, the hut was roughly three meters by three meters with a hard dirt floor. One white plastic bowl sat in a corner, and there was one large metal pot surrounded by large stones for cooking and heating. There were also some knives, spoons, plastic containers, and a hodgepodge of clothes. The boys boiled manioc and onions that grew in a field next to the village to make rudimentary fufu, a staple dish of the poor in the DRC. They slept on mats on the ground. During the rainy season, they draped the hut in as many spare pieces of plastic tarp and ripped up raffia sacks as they could find. Water from the storms inevitably seeped through and muddied the ground on which they slept.

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.

To this day, the official national identification cards used by every citizen in the DRC to prove their citizenship have not been updated since 1997, when the country was called Zaire. As a result, most people use their voter registration cards as a substitute form of identification. 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.

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.

On August 18, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower met with his national security council to discuss the situation in the Congo and proclaimed that the U.S. had to “get rid of this guy.”5 The CIA hatched a plot to assassinate Lumumba using toothpaste poisoned with cobra venom; they settled instead on a plan to recruit Lumumba’s friend and the head of the army, Joseph Mobutu, to overthrow him.

A senior official at Gécamines offered a different theory: “Glencore shut Mutanda to pressure the Congolese government to provide better terms on taxes.” The official explained that despite heavy opposition from Glencore, including an in-person meeting in Kinshasa between then CEO Ivan Glasenberg and Joseph Kabila on March 7, 2018, the DRC government declared cobalt to be a “strategic” substance on November 24, 2018. Doing so initiated an increase in the royalty rate from 3.5 percent to 10 percent that mining companies had to pay for extracted cobalt. The new policy also established a 50 percent tax on superprofits. The tax on superprofits was to be triggered when a commodity’s price increased by more than 25 percent above levels that were cited in the mining company’s initial bankable feasibility study to assess the geologic reserves in the concession prior to commencing operations. If the price of cobalt rose enough, mining companies would be on the hook for the superprofit tax. Cobalt prices on the London Metal Exchange in fact increased by more than 100 percent from their lows in the summer of 2019 to the summer of 2021.

Glencore appeared to have financial leverage with which to pressure the Congolese government, but the plan did not work, nor did rumors of graft and shady dealings. For years, the company has been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, and the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland for alleged money laundering, bribery, and corruption relating to its mining operations in the DRC.4

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.

The official said he was aware that I was a researcher from America, and he wanted me to help raise awareness of the plight being faced by the artisanal miners who worked at Shabara and across the Copper Belt. He echoed the sentiments of Makaza near Étoile, Samy in Fungurume, and so many others I met—the Congolese people were being pushed over the cliff’s edge by foreign mining companies that kept appropriating more of their land each year. The COMAKAT official drew a line in the dirt with his declaration, “We will not leave,” but the issue was not as simple as pitting artisanal miners against foreign mining companies.

Considering that it was just one of the many industrial mining sites in which artisanal mining was the dominant mode of production, two facts seemed indisputable: 1) the artisanal contribution of total cobalt production in the Congo could easily exceed even the highest estimates of 30 percent, and 2) the massive amount of artisanal production from the Congo had to flow into the formal supply chains of big tech and EV companies. Where else could 180,000 tons per year of cobalt ore possibly go?