"The horror! The horror!"

 “Cobalt Red – How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives” by Siddharth Kara, 2023

This is the true and grim story of the Congo (DRC), a rich land and people still being exploited for, among other commodities, cobalt. Cobalt is a necessary ingredient in the rechargeable batteries used by every large tech, manufacturing and car company in the world.  That includes Apple, Tesla, Samsung, Glencore, Daimler, along with the Chinese BYD, CATL and Huawei.  This book focuses on cobalt and the labor conditions of the ‘artisanal’ miners who do this work by hand, not industrial mining.

Kara traveled in person to the mining areas of the DRC between Lubumbashi and Kolwezi in the southern part of the country where huge deposits of copper and cobalt are located. This area is called Haut-Katanga and Lualaba. He compares conditions there to a continuation of King Leopold of Belgium’s rubber and timber empire and Lord Leverhulme’s palm nut plantations, which were little more than murder and slavery outposts.  As Roger Casement and Joseph Conrad discovered, the Congo was the real ‘Heart of Darkness.’ After independence from Belgium in 1960 and the execution of left nationalist Patrice Lumumba by locals with the help of the CIA in 1961, the government in Kinshasa has been dominated by one comprador dictator after another.  64 years of Mobutu, two Kabilas and now Tshisekedi.

HOW IT’S DONE

At present Chinese firms control 15 of the 19 biggest mining sites and companies in the DRC’s copper belt.  This gives them majority control of the mineral at the heart of electric batteries - cobalt. The hand digging is done by ‘artisanal’ miners called creuseurs, who are local families using primitive tools to dig the ore - heterogenite - out of the red ground and put it in sacks.  They get paid mostly by Chinese middle-men – negotiants - between $1 and $2 a day depending on its purity. The middle-men then transport the ore to mostly Chinese brokers – comptoirs – at ‘depots’, who sell to the large combines. 

Other minerals like tantalum/coltan from the DRC are key to making electronics, with the DRC producing 40% of the world’s supply.  Gold, silver, copper, diamonds, lithium and more are all mined there too, many times using these same primitive methods. These ‘artisanal’ miners dig 30% of the cobalt and 26% of the tantalum world-wide.  45 million miners work in the sector of ‘artisanal’ mining, called ASM. Kara does not have their percent in the DRC however but guesses it might be over 30%. Virtual slave cobalt is laundered by this hidden chain of diggers, negotiators and buyers that lead to the large processors, refiners and finally, battery producers. Both informal and industrial sector ores are mixed at the source. 

The ‘artisanal’ workers in the DRC might be the most exploited proletarians in existence, especially given the trillions cobalt is valued at as a commodity. The race for it started in the 1990s, principally for electric cars, and is now dominated by the Chinese.  This became part of the Chines “Belt and Road” initiative, as the Congo got a paved road for trains of semis to haul these minerals out to Zambia and on to China and Europe.  Nearly the only people getting rich inside the Congo are those connected to the government, along with their cronies.  It is a country that suffers from the capitalist ‘resource curse.’ 5.4 million deaths in the Congo have been attributed to fighting over control of ‘conflict’ minerals since 1998-2003.  Fighting has broadened in the north recently, led by Tutsi guerillas backed by reactionary Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who wants a ‘greater Rwanda’ evidently. 

If you are one to cheer Chinese ‘revolutionaries’ – a quaint way to put it at this point in history – you should examine how the export of capital from China is actually working.  Given the deep reformism of uncritical pro-China lefties, this might be difficult. In 2021 China processed 75% of the world’s cobalt and it was not just state-run or funded outfits doing this. And that brings up the obvious question – can a national state industry heavily exploit workers and nations overseas?  There is an obvious answer.

TRAVELS

Kara traveled to the DRC 3 times as a journalist, taking the road to Kolwezi from Lubumbashi’s airport.  A pass from a local administrator saved his life at one point, as everything in the mining belt is heavily guarded by armed police, soldiers or company militias. Because he looks Indian, he was able to avoid some problems, and was helped by local Indian guides.  While every consumer-facing company claims their production line is exempt from child labor, virtual slavery, bloodshed, health problems, environmental ruin and the like, Kara never saw ‘inspectors’ from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-certifying organizations like the GBA or RMI, nor proof their guarantees were working. It was ‘labor-washing’ from top to bottom, nice words on pages with no enforcement. 

High concentrations of lead, uranium and cobalt, along with other heavy metals, are found in the bodies of diggers, children and everyone in the copper belt, along with vegetables, chickens and pigs. It is transmitted in the air, water and soil, with lung problems being common.  Cancer rates are rising, the clinics are inadequate and water runoff is not monitored by the Congolese government even though the 2002 Mining Code mandates this. Local groups that talked to Kara attempt to protect miners, including about land disputes, yet get little traction.  According to Kara billions in Chinese money guarantees the government does nothing. The uranium for the Manhattan Project was even sourced here in Katanga in the 1940s. It is a poison zone. 

In an interview with a Chinese mid-level mine manager named Hu, Hu said that the problems with Africans is that they are lazy and disorganized.  That is why they are poor.  Hu added that if they didn’t receive so much foreign aid, they’d work harder.  Sound familiar?  Exploitation is always accompanied by racism or some other dominant class ideology.  Even by the ‘revolutionary’ Chinese, who have replaced Europeans and Mobutu’s Zaire/DRC state mines, which were sold off by Kabila to foreign firms. 

Kara tells many, many stories of poverty-stricken villages, of massive, tunnel and hard-scrabble mines, of the people he visited. Many locals work at mining because there are few jobs otherwise. Single females are subject to rape on a frequent basis and are paid less, so sometimes they work in groups.  Children are not paid.    There are girls with babies digging; children grabbed by commando militiamen forced to work; remote mines that tunnel underground like an anthill; diggers who work for the Congolese Army, which in turn sells to Chinese firms. The Army sometimes used force to gather or move workers to digs, but many were afraid to tell Kara their stories. 

BACKGROUND and FOREGROUND

Kara retells a mini-history of the Congo, from its European discovery in 1482 by Portuguese sailors, through slavery times, then as a Belgian colony, the journey of Stanley & Livingston, ‘independence,’ a neo colonial rebellion in Katanga led by Tshombe that led to the execution of Lumumba; and years of dictators … all overlaying the material riches of the country, profit being the real and continuing ‘heart of darkness.’        

The biggest mine in the DRC, TFM – Tenke Fungurume - is 1,500 square kilometers, the size of London.  The roads are choked with check points, semi-trailers, motorbikes, diesel and dust.  This mine is now 80% Chinese-owned, after going through U.S. hands, producing 150,700 tons of cobalt in 2021, an underestimate.  Forests were cleared, thousands were removed from their homes to build and expand it and there have been a number of riots. The ore is processed on-site using sulfuric acid, which gets in the water and air. 

Glencore, the Anglo-Swiss mining giant, owns the large Mutanda mine just west, which also removed residents. Because of Mutanda, locals realized there was something valuable on their land and started a co-operative named COMAKAT next door.  In a huge pit Kara estimated that he saw 15,000 men and boys hacking at the rock and earth for cobalt ore. This mine produces 180,000 tons a year and COMAKAT takes 20%, some of which actually went to the miners at a higher rate than other privatized mines.  There are several other cooperative artisanal mines in the region.  Kara also visits two small NGO-run artisanal mines, which allegedly prohibit child labor, have water and toilets on-site, sometimes supply workers with protective gear, shield women and might pay $3 a day.  But there were problems of failed or reduced payments, forged birth certificates and mixing ores with other mines, so he thinks both NGOs failed to do what they claimed.

Kara tracks instances of uranium smuggling by Chinese contractors.  He visits the biggest child-labor mine in the copper belt, Tilwezembe, full of horror stories. Most children work in the mining sector, as ‘public’ schooling is not funded in the DRC very well, so a fee is required.  Or they are too tired from working to pay attention even when they do attend school.  He interviews a government mining official from Kinshasa who claims all the critical NGOs are lying about conditions in the DRC mining sectors.  He also accuses the foreign mining companies of tax evasion by under-counting their tonnage or hiding the cobalt in copper data, which Kara finds to be a legitimate complaint. Kara finally arrives at Kolwezi in his drive, which he calls the ‘Wild West’ of EV production, the California gold rush if you will. It is a city of 1.5 million, full of migrants from all over Africa, including India and China. You can easily see the pits around Kolwezi from Google Earth or Google maps.  He finally visits the worst site of all, Kamilombe, where a mine is also a grave.

This is an enlightening book, though the stories and narrative all run together after a while into a withering mix. He visits nearly every mining complex, region, village, town and small mine along the route, interviewing dozens who repeat the same points.  But the main point is obvious.  Neo-colonial capitalism has turned parts of the supposedly independent DRC into an exploited hell-hole.  He is reluctant to blame capitalism as a whole, professes to be a pacifist, but he’s still a damn good reporter.   Lumumba’s last written words were “Long Live the Congo!” “Long Live Africa!” and Kara endorses these words.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  ‘Congo,’ ‘Casement,’ ‘tantalum,’ ‘cobalt,’ ‘Lumumba,’ ‘colonialism.’

And I got it at the Library!

Red Frog / February 24, 2025