Name: Cobalt Red
ISBN: 9781250284303

Siddharth Kara

How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Cobalt Red

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In the modern era, slavery has been universally rejected and basic human rights are deemed erga omnes and jus cogens in international law. The ongoing exploitation of the poorest people of the Congo by the rich and powerful invalidates the purported moral foundation of contemporary civilization and drags humanity back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only by their replacement cost. The implications of this moral reversion, which is itself a form of violence, stretch far beyond central Africa across the entire global south, where a vast subclass of humanity continues to eke out a subhuman existence in slave-like conditions at the bottom of the global economic order. Less has changed since colonial times than we might care to admit.

The titanic companies that sell products containing Congolese cobalt are worth trillions, yet the people who dig their cobalt out of the ground eke out a base existence characterized by extreme poverty and immense suffering. They exist at the edge of human life in an environment that is treated like a toxic dumping ground by foreign mining companies. Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

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. It was a bold, anti-colonial vision that could have altered the course of history in the Congo and across Africa. In short order, Belgium, the United Nations, the United States, and the neocolonial interests they represented rejected Lumumba’s vision, conspired to assassinate him, and propped up a violent dictator, Joseph Mobutu, in his place. For thirty-two years, Mobutu supported the Western agenda, kept Katanga’s minerals flowing in their direction, and enriched himself just as egregiously as the colonizers who came before him.

No one knew at the outset that the Congo would prove to be home to some of the largest supplies of almost every resource the world desired, often at the time of new inventions or industrial developments—ivory for piano keys, crucifixes, false teeth, and carvings (1880s), rubber for car and bicycle tires (1890s), palm oil for soap (1900s+), copper, tin, zinc, silver, and nickel for industrialization (1910+), diamonds and gold for riches (always), uranium for nuclear bombs (1945), tantalum and tungsten for microprocessors (2000s+), and cobalt for rechargeable batteries (2012+). The developments that sparked demand for each resource attracted a new wave of treasure seekers. 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.

Lithium-based chemistries became the dominant form for rechargeable batteries because lithium is the lightest metal in the world, which has obvious benefits for consumer technology and electric vehicle applications. Cobalt is used in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries because it possesses a unique electron configuration that allows the battery to remain stable at higher energy densities throughout repeated charge-discharge cycles. Higher energy density means the battery can hold more charge, which is critical to maximize the driving range of an electric vehicle between charges.

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. […] Cancers were also on the rise in artisanal mining communities, especially of the breast, kidney, and lung. “Exposure to nickel and uranium are the biggest causes of cancer,” Germain said.

Let’s say a decent wage for adults might accomplish all of this and more—who should pay it? Foreign mining companies would argue that they do not employ artisanal miners, so the responsibility is not theirs, even though the cobalt from artisanal digging ends up in their supply chains, and even though in some cases they allow artisanal miners to work on their concessions to boost production. The government of the DRC would argue that they do not have the money to support good wages or other income schemes, even though mining concessions are sold for billions of dollars and royalties and taxes in the billions are collected each year based in no small part on the value of the minerals excavated by artisanal miners. Cobalt refiners, battery manufacturers, and tech and EV companies would argue that the responsibility should be borne downstream, even though the scramble for cobalt only exists because of their demand for it. 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.

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.

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. Rubber exports from the Congo Free State increased ninety-six-fold from 1890 to 1904, making it the most profitable colony in Africa.

Lumumba wrote to the United Nations asking for assistance in expelling the Belgians and reunifying the country. The UN responded with the largest ground operation since its creation to help stabilize the nation, but the forces were not authorized to expel Belgian troops. Lumumba turned instead to the Soviet Union for help. The possibility that the Congo, and especially Katanga, might come under Soviet influence put the United States, the United Nations, and Belgium into overdrive to dispatch Lumumba. 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.”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.

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. […] 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.

Gloire was in excruciating pain, but the clinic did not have any painkillers other than acetaminophen, which was incapable of dulling his discomfort. The clinic also did not have antibiotics to treat a potential infection, nor an x-ray machine with which to determine the extent of the bone damage. A nurse cleaned and bandaged Gloire’s leg and sent him home.

From a U.S. perspective, we are concerned about the North Koreans and what they are doing in the Congo,” U.S. ambassador Mike Hammer explained. “If there are “North Koreans here, one has to be on the lookout for any nefarious activity.”

Even with only a fraction of the picture, it seemed evident that Tilwezembe was not just a copper-cobalt mine, it was a killing field.

It is tempting to point the finger at local actors as the agents of the carnage—be it corrupt politicians, exploitative cooperatives, unhinged soldiers, or extortionist bosses. They all played their roles, but they were also symptoms of a more malevolent disease: the global economy run amok in Africa. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and 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 and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.

“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.”

“The mama says the lake is poison,” he reported. “She said, ‘It kills the babies inside us. Mosquitoes do not drink the blood of the people who work here.’”

They explained that the organization had received several million dollars in support from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Dell, and a commodity trading company called Trafigura to set up the model site in Mutoshi, and a certain image had to be maintained. The purpose of the site was to provide a clean source of cobalt for CHEMAF customers, which included the donors. 

Specifically, there appeared to be child-mined cobalt entering Mutoshi through the spaghetti-wire fence. Teenagers worked at the site with fake voter registration cards. The radiation officer was not regularly checking radiation levels. Bags of cobalt were not tagged, and cobalt from unknown origins was purchased from external depots and mixed at CHEMAF’s refining facility in Lubumbashi. Crucially, reduced or delayed wage payments appeared to be a major disincentive for many artisanal miners and was compromising the viability of the entire operation. The purported supply chain transparency and traceability turned out to be a fiction.

Mind you, the “richest” income I documented in Kasulo was an average take-home pay of $7 per day. There are spikes to $12 or even $15 when a particularly rich vein of heterogenite is found. That is the lotto ticket everyone is after. The most fortunate tunnel diggers in Kasulo earn around $3,000 per year. By way of comparison, the CEOs of the technology and car companies that buy the cobalt mined from Kasulo earn $3,000 in an hour, and they do so without having to put their lives at risk each day that they go to work.

When a tunnel collapses in Kasulo, most bodies are never recovered. The family members are unable to give their loved ones a proper funeral. They are compelled instead to walk each day upon their dead. That is the reality that no one up the chain wants us to see. That is the truth that is meant to be forever buried here. The cruel design of a tunnel collapse makes sure of it, and everyone knows it. Perhaps they count on it—the impenetrable silence that obscures the vast tally of severed lives upon which great fortunes are built.

Cobalt Red How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives