In Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, American journalist Siddharth Kara takes us into the Congo’s child-filled mines between 2018 and 2021—at least, as far as the Congo’s military will allow him. Kara encounters numerous obstacles in accessing mines to document and miners to interview. Government and mining company officials do not even try to hide the fact that journalists are not welcome there. If word were to get out—if someone were to, say, write a book about the conditions in the Congo’s mines—increased attention on the mines’ deadly conditions could jeopardize the capitalists’ monopoly on all the region’s resources and on its inhabitants’ lives.
The hero and the victim in Cobalt Red
The Congolese government has historically gone to great lengths to obscure conditions in the mining provinces. Anyone seeking to expose the realities, such as journalists, NGO workers, researchers, or foreign news media, is heavily monitored during their stay. The Congolese military and other security forces are omnipresent in mining areas, making access to mining sites dangerous and at times impossible. Perceived troublemakers can be arrested, tortured, or worse.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p. 9
Kara acknowledges that he is not the first journalist to venture to the Congo’s mining provinces, but Cobalt Red‘s readers have inevitably felt a bit of a hero complex seep through.
Cobalt Red is written as a record of Kara’s travels through the Congo’s mining provinces and the suffering he witnesses along the way. The Congolese people are the one-dimensional victims of predatory Chinese mining companies and the absent tech corporations responsible for it all.
On page 221, near the end of Cobalt Red, Kara is having a conversation with a miner who recalls his parents’ humorous reaction to seeing that they had eight sons and no daughters. Kara tell us, “It was the first time I heard an artisanal miner laugh.” I was taken aback by the misery that the miners must live in that there was no laughter to be heard in the mining provinces. But that was obviously an oversimplified way to see Congolese people.
Cobalt Red omits Congolese joy
Of course Congolese miners laugh. Their lives are very difficult, but they are still human. Maybe if Kara had tried telling them more jokes or had had conversations with them about topics aside from their trauma, they may have laughed more. He did acknowledge once that they find joy and comfort in their faith in God in this out-of-place passage:
As the ruckus from the highway faded, I caught the sound of a chorus. The uplifting voices drew me to the [International Christian Alliance Church]. Inside, I found a large room packed with congregants. They sang passionately, led by a vibrant pastor atop a small wooden platform. A child looked at me, his wide eyes alight and comforting. I understood at last how the people of the Congo survived their daily torment—they loved God with full and fiery hearts and drew comfort from the promise of salvation.
Although their love was powerful, the evidence was mounting that it was all but unrequited.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p.132
The church scene was an odd thing to mention, especially since it would have been a great opportunity to perhaps interview some congregants afterwards. Kara could have asked about the joy that their faith and the church community bring to their lives, but that wouldn’t have fit with Cobalt Red‘s overall theme of constant suffering.
Because of this and because of its repetitive nature (“I visited this mine, then this mine, then this mine, etc.”), I don’t necessarily classify Cobalt Red itself as a must-read. It is essential to understand the effects of colonialism on the Congo, but as many other reviewers have said, this well-researched report gets the same message across.
Congolese voices
The Congolese people are suffering. They are the slaves at the bottom of the global supply chain. But they are more than that, and they are more than workhorses who die so you can have a phone. In the epilogue, a Congolese ambassador to the United States tells Kara that “if [Kara] really wanted to help, he should go back [to the Congo] and assist local researchers in doing so.” Kara tells the ambassador that he will, and jumps into an explanation of why it’s best when oppressed people can speak for themselves. But if Kara ever went back to assist local researchers, I wasn’t able to find any evidence that he did.
While Kara shares several of the miners’ (anonymized) stories, I wish above all that the great Congo exposé book of the 2020s could have come from a Congolese author. A collection of essays by former Congolese miners could have shown readers their lives in a more dynamic, meaningful way. Maybe, one day, there will be one.
The utopian U.S.
For now, the great Congo exposé book that we have is Cobalt Red. Others have expressed disappointment with the Western lens through which we view Congolese stories. Kara occasionally makes comparisons to life in countries like the US, which he, perhaps unintentionally, paints as utopian.
Nothing looks the same after a trip to the Congo. The world back home no longer makes sense. It is difficult to reconcile how it even inhabits the same planet. Neatly arranged mountains of vegetables at grocery stores seem vulgar. Bright lights and flushing toilets seem like sorcery. Clean air and water feel like a crime. The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent. Most of it was built, after all, on violence, neatly tucked away in history books that tend to sanitize the truth.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p. 69
Admittedly, this paragraph had a powerful effect on me the first time I read it and it still does. Of course there are vegetables and toilets in the Congo, but not in the poor mining villages that Kara visited. What he misses is that so many people in the United States do not have these luxuries.
While I found some of the ways that Kara tells the Congolese story disappointing, that doesn’t diminish the fact that the story itself is shocking and that it is imperative that more people hear it.
Corporate lies
In these relatively affluent, tech-dependent countries, tech giants like Apple, Samsung, and Tesla shield themselves with hollow “zero-tolerance policies” regarding things like child labor and human rights violations. Kara shares these short statements on page four of the book. He explains that the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) and Global Battery Alliance (GBA) promote safe and responsible sourcing of minerals, enforcing these values with regular assessments of mining conditions.
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.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p. 5
Somehow, in chapter 2, Kara is able to have a phone conversation with Mathy Stanislaus, the director of the GBA at the time (summer of 2020). Stanislaus “acknowledged that there were some problems, at least as it relates to child labor.” He tells Kara, “According to the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], up to seventy percent of the cobalt from the DR [Democratic Republic of the] Congo has some touch with child labor. There are large gaps of information on the supply chain, so we have to fix the information flow in a trusted way.”
Neither RMI or GBA ever come up again.
The supply chain
While tech companies pretend to care about human rights violations and child slave trafficking, they shockingly do not. They are acutely aware of their reliance on slavery, but their excuse is “the supply chain.”
Kara repeatedly emphasizes the intentionally untraceable nature of the global cobalt supply chain in Cobalt Red. One of the excuses that cobalt buyers use is that they only buy cobalt from “model sites.” The two model sites that Kara visits, called CDM and CHEMAF, were said to have “safe working conditions for artisanal miners, no child labor, fair wages, no dangerous tunnel mining, and above all, ironclad assurances that cobalt mined from the sites was never mixed with cobalt from any other source.”
Model sites
Kara was told that the CHEMAF site, in a mine called Mutoshi, had been “designed in coordination with a Washington, D.C.-based nongovernmental organization called Pact.” He met with a few Pact employees in the nearby city, Kolwezi.
[The Pact employees] asked to speak anonymously for fear of negative reactions by Pact headquarters. I asked why there would be any negative reactions for speaking with me, and they said that they were not supposed to speak with outsiders about the Mutoshi site. 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.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p. 196
The fear instilled in Pact workers shows the sharp contrast between Pact’s website’s upbeat and progressive attitude and the conditions that the organization allows to continue in the Congo’s mines. Here’s a side-by-side of what the Pact team told Kara and what Kara witnessed on the ground on their “model” site.
| What Pact wants you to believe about the mine | The truth about the mine |
| Only registered adult workers could work at the mine, to prevent child labor. Individuals prove their age when registering by showing their voter registration cards. | “Voter registration cards were often forged to show that fifteen- and sixteen-year old children were eighteen, thereby allowing them to work at the site.” |
| The mine was surrounded by an “impenetrable, electrified fence,” to keep unregistered workers from entering. | A non-electrified spaghetti-wire fence surrounding the mine “had been yanked down in numerous places, creating just enough space for a person to pass through.” |
| All workers at the mine had personal protective equipment and uniforms. | The women whose job it was to rinse stones in a “brackish, cruddy pool of water” “did not have any safety equipment to protect their hands or legs from whatever toxic substances had accumulated in the water.” |
| Radiation officers test the mine every month for unsafe levels of uranium. | The official who gave Kara a tour of the mine “could not say when the officer” had last checked radiation levels at the site. |
| All ore mined at the site was kept in tagged bags to keep it from being mixed with (more) unethically-sourced ore up the supply chain. | The official told Kara, “We do not tag bags at all.” |
| The Pact team conducted regular audits at the mine to be sure that these procedures were maintained. | The official told Kara that “Pact staff never come here.” |
| A portion of Pact’s millions from tech companies went to efforts to keep at least 2,000 local children out of mines and in school. | The Pact staff later told Kara that 219 students had been enrolled in school under the program years prior, but the staff could not say how many, if any, were still in school. |
Performative protection
To be fair, some of what the Pact workers had told Kara was actually true—and it wasn’t small things, either. Workers at the CHEMAF model site were required to take Breathalyzer tests upon entering, and alcohol was prohibited. (Alcohol was common in mines to prevent workers from feeling the worst of the suffering.) Because this mine was “dry,” several women working there told Kara that they preferred this mine, even with its especially low wages, to nearby mines simply because this was the only place where they could avoid being constantly sexually assaulted. Relatedly, visibly pregnant women and girls—which were all too common in most mines—were not allowed to work at Mutoshi.
But any efforts made at this model site, made to keep up appearances to elite donors, were meaningless because they didn’t tag their bags of heterogenite (copper-cobalt) ore. The official who showed Kara around the mine told him that the drivers who pick up ore from the CHEMAF site fill up their trucks with ore from other depots along the way to the processing facility. Even worse, those small holes in the fence happened to be perfectly sized for the children who would bring the ore they had mined at nearby sites to sell right there to buyers at this “model site.”
Buyers further up the supply chain had absolutely no way of distinguishing between (somewhat) ethically-sourced cobalt and cobalt mined by often-pregnant, often-child slaves. Any progress by this model site stopped when “CHEMAF had ended its association with Pact and shut down the artisanal mine” a few months after Kara’s visit which was likely in 2019. The site had only opened in 2016.
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.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p. 118
Congolese sue big tech
Irrefutable evidence that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell, and Tesla are aware of their complicity in the Congo’s crisis emerged in a class action lawsuit brought against them by former miners and their representatives in 2022, after Cobalt Red was written but before it was published. The U.S. Court of Appeals – D.C. Circuit dismissed John Doe et al. v. Apple et al., on the basis that “Purchasing an unspecified amount of cobalt through the global supply chain is not ‘participation in a venture’ within the meaning of the TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008].”
In other words, the tech companies don’t participate in the forced labor of cobalt. They just buy cobalt, from… wherever they buy it from.
Kara puts it this way:
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.
Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red, p. 65
Conclusion
I wish more than anything that I knew how to solve the world’s problems. Some are more straightforward—Israel ceases its genocide in Gaza and returns the land to the Palestinians—but from my limited knowledge, the crisis in the Congo isn’t as simple. Our world depends on our technology, but the slavery and human trafficking in the Congo needs to stop just the same. For now, all that I know I can do is spread the word and ask that folks think twice before buying another brand new device. Instead, we can resist the urge to get the newest technology like the iPhone 16; we can join the growing Right to Repair movement and repair our devices instead of replacing them; and if and when we do buy devices, we can buy them refurbished instead of new. It’s the least we can do.