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

by Siddharth Kara

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.

Joseph Conrad immortalized the evil of Leopold’s Congo Free State in Heart of Darkness (1899) with four words—“The horror! The horror!” He subsequently described the Congo Free State as the “vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience” and a land in which “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks is the basis of administration.” The year after Heart of Darkness was published, the first known person to walk the length of Africa from the Cape to Cairo, E. S. Grogan, described Leopold’s territory as a “vampire growth.” In The Casement Report (1904), Roger Casement, British consul to the Congo Free State, described the colony as a “veritable hell on earth.”

By 1910, around 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were propelled by electric engines. Had the trend continued, we would all be living on a cleaner, cooler planet.

One senior parliamentarian in Kinshasa once told me that the international community was mistaken about the issue of child labor at artisanal mines in the Congo. According to him, they were actually Pygmies.

Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history. —Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

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.

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