Kat Gale’s Reviews > Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives > Status Update

When I saw the tragic consequences of a tunnel collapse with my own eyes, it was utterly devastating. 63 buried alive...No one has ever accepted responsibility for these deaths. The accident has never even been acknowledged. This was the final truth of cobalt mining in the Congo: the life of a child buried alive while digging for cobalt counted for nothing. All the dead here counted for nothing.

I asked Hani if he ever made any inquiries as to the source of the cobalt ore he purchased.
"What do you mean?” he asked.
"I mean, do you try to determine if the ore came from child labor like Arran uses or some other kind of abuse?”
He laughed and lit a cigarette in the candle at our dining table.
“One does not ask such questions here,” he said.
“Why not?”
“There would be no cobalt left to buy.”

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 depravity& indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, & devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected& preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.

Campaigns of violence and intimidation work up to a point, and the point at which they no longer work is the moment a person feels they have nothing left to lose. For those from whom everything has already been taken, even the harshest penalty means little compared to the power of speaking … or for speaking on behalf of those who can no longer speak.

The Congolese government directly contributed to the crisis by auctioning off massive parcels of land for billions of dollars & collecting concession fees, royalties, & taxes....So long as the political elite were content to continue the tradition of government-as-theft established by their colonial antecedents, the people of the Congo would continue to suffer.

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, beyond 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?

The Belgians sold a 75,000 square-kilometer concession of rainforest filled with palm oil trees to the Lever brothers [on April 14, 1911], 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.

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% of that money could do if it were spent on the people who needed it, not stolen by those who exploited them.

Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington were among the many supporters of the Congo Reform Association...bringing an end to the most brazen system of slavery in the history of Africa. Or so it seemed...More than a century after Morel & Casement’s extraordinary campaign to end slavery in the Congo, a new system of “legalized robbery enforced by violence” thrives in the mining provinces.