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

by Siddharth Kara

More than a century ago, E. D. Morel described the Congo Free State as “a gigantic slave-farm reeking with cruelty.”12

The luggage room is manned by a third batch of soldiers who rummage through the suitcases of foreign passengers for items that might indicate the person has an interest in prying into matters they should not, like the mining sector.

Displacement of the native population due to mine expansion is a major crisis in the mining provinces. As the living conditions of displaced people worsen, their desperation increases, and that desperation is precisely what drives thousands of local inhabitants to scrounge for cobalt in hazardous conditions on the land they once occupied.

in two generations, we will have two hundred million people who are poor, uneducated, and have nothing left of value. This is what is happening, and if it does not stop, it will be a disaster.

The ore transportation fees seemed to be little more than a money grab by the government. Why else charge people for driving rocks from one place to another? The fees also made it impossible for most artisanal miners to access markets directly due to their inability to pay the tax. Being cut off from the marketplace forced them to accept submarket prices from négociants for their hard labor, further reinforcing the state of poverty that pushed them into artisanal mining to begin with.

Sexual assault was a scourge in almost every artisanal mining area I visited. The women and girls who suffered these attacks represented the invisible, brutalized backbone of the global cobalt supply chain. No one at the top of the chain even bothered making press statements about zero-tolerance policies on sexual assault against the women and girls who scrounged for their cobalt.

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

Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.

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.

In Africa, a hierarchy was soon established—Africans at the bottom, Indians and Arabs above them, and Europeans at the top. Skin tone dictated the hierarchy back then, and it still does today—simply swap out the Europeans with the Chinese.

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.

Fuel supplies were often unable to keep up with demand, which led to a hunt for “Gaddafis,” the term for hustlers that stockpile gasoline in plastic containers when supplies are plentiful, then resell it at a hefty premium when they dwindle.

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.

What else could the purpose of this kind of remote night marketplace be, other than to launder artisanally mined cobalt into the formal supply chain completely out of view, and certainly beyond the scope of any tracing or auditing of cobalt supply chains that were purportedly taking place? Can any company at the top of the chain legitimately suggest that the cobalt in their devices or cars did not pass through a village marketplace like this?

Glencore, which had paid the Congolese government $626.9 million in taxes and royalties in 2018 from the Mutanda site alone and $1.08 billion in total taxes and royalties from all its mining operations in the DRC.

So long as the political elite were content to continue the tradition of government-as-theft established by their colonial antecedents,

As we were digging this tunnel, we did not earn any money because there was no cobalt. Chief Banza gave us food and CF 2,000 [about $1.10] each day while we were digging. Once we found the cobalt, he said we must pay him back from the cobalt we removed from the tunnel. If we did not agree, we were not allowed to work at Tilwezembe.

They traced the operation back to a Lebanese smuggler named Arran and determined that the uranium was headed for North Korea. There were also reports of North Korean operatives on the ground in the DRC assisting with the deal.

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.

“Every day people are dying because of the cobalt. Describing this will not change anything.”

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.”

“We have no kind of life in Lebanon. Lebanon is a failed country. Here a person can make a business for themselves.”

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.

The colleague who sent the video told me that 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.

By all accounts, heterogenite should fetch a similar price for the same grade regardless of where it was sold, so there were clearly other market forces behind the variance in prices. Perhaps being forced by soldiers to sell cobalt at the depots at Lake Malo pushed prices downward in that area. Perhaps open competition at Musompo pushed prices upward. Perhaps the inability to access markets except via négociants explained why prices near Kipushi were so low. Whatever the reasons, the variability of pricing at depots, along with the lack of bargaining power and access to markets, represented considerable disadvantages for artisanal miners.

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.

they asserted that the international community also had to appreciate that in the Congo, a fifteen-year-old boy would consider himself to be a grown man. Europeans and Americans were not in a position to determine what constituted adulthood in the Congo. A fifteen-year-old already had to provide for his family as an adult would, I was told. It was a fair point. The norms of wealthy countries could not simply be imposed upon the poor. What makes eighteen the magic number for adulthood?

I asked Ikolo if it was worth the risk. He went silent for a moment before offering a response. “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.”

The people whose ancestors were once forced to measure their lives in kilos of rubber were now forced to measure their lives in kilos of cobalt.

Mutombo’s daily descent created value denoted in the billions of dollars for everyone up the chain, yet only he and those like him assumed all the risk.

One encounters the limits of what human hearts can endure all too often in the Congo. The land is filled with monsters, and the beast that dwells beneath Kasulo is a thousand-headed hydra, mouths agape at the surface, waiting for its prey to enter.

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.”

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

I am not aware of any conferences about cobalt mining at the OECD in Paris or at UN headquarters in Geneva and New York that included artisanal miners at the table. For that matter, I doubt that many of the people, if any, who participate in these conferences have ever visited an artisanal mining site in the Congo and spoken to the people who work there. The same goes for the CEOs of major tech and car companies that buy Congolese cobalt. Meaningful solutions cannot be devised if they are devoid of direct input from those the solutions are meant to assist. This is particularly true in the Congo, where the voices on the ground tell a very different, if not antithetical, story to the one told at the top.