Book review: Cobalt Red

There's blood in that battery

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 these resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering.

Cobalt Red, written by Siddharth Kara, describes “artisanal” cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo*, a lifestyle that roughly approximates hell on earth. Men, women and children who are zero to one step above slavery dig, sort, crush, tunnel and most of all die in the pursuit of the cobalt that enables our comfortable, battery-powered lives. Here’s what you need to know about the artisanal miners of the Congo.

*Henceforth referred to simply as “the Congo” in this review

Every morning hundreds of thousands if not millions of Congolese wake up, don their plastic flip flops or go barefoot to the mine. The mines vary from Olympic pool size all the way up to hundreds of feet in diameter and several hundred feet deep. The safest work is on the surface but that’s not always where the cobalt is.

Men and boys frequently dig tunnels to find high concentration deposits. These tunnels may go as deep as one-hundred and eighty feet, but the shafts are only three feet wide. The miners descend into the tunnel on their hands and knees while the only way back up is by climbing a rope. The miners don’t have access to protective equipment and only some of the tunnels have an air and/or water pump.

Cave-ins are mind numbingly common and when they happen dozens of people can die. Crushed immediately or buried alive, it makes little difference since rescue is impossible. The artisanal miners work with rebar and other hand tools, they could never dig a hundred feet in time to save their trapped relatives. On the rare occasion when a survivor is found the injuries may be so severe that they’re crippled for life.

A man descends into a mining tunnel

Tens of thousands of children or more across the Congo work at the mines, often crushing the cobalt into smaller pieces then washing away impurities in toxic water that burns the skin and does God knows what damage to the internals. These children should be in school but their families cannot afford the $5 monthly fee. Children often come to the mine after one of their parents or an older sibling is killed, as their is little work in a country with such a pathetic education system.

After reading Cobalt Red and discovering how the artisanal miners live I believe it’s fair to say that theirs is one of the worst existences I’ve ever heard of. Life for the artisanal miners is not meaningfully different from a hundred years ago when the Congolese had their hands chopped off for not meeting quotas in the rubber industry.

There is grief, and then there is soul-wrenching misery. There is loss, and then there is life-destroying calamity. One encounters the limits of what human hearts can endure all too often in the Congo.

Who is to blame?

We must tread carefully as we attempt to figure out who is to blame. Although there are significant culprits, there is no single factor that can easily explain the situation. In 1890 Joseph Conrad toured the Congo on a riverboat and the journey can be neatly encapsulated in the four words he famously wrote, The horror! The horror! For more than a hundred years western countries pillaged the Congo for its resources and forced the local populace into a greater or lesser form of slavery/debt bondage.

Remember a few years ago when Saudi Arabia lured Jamal Khashoggi into an embassy in Turkey where thugs killed him, resized the remains and atomized the evidence in a vat of acid? And the whole western world was up in arms about how barbaric the Saudis are? Justifiably so! But what do you think about the Belgians? Good beer and chocolate perhaps, but surprises lurk below.

In 1960 the Congolese voted in Patrice Lumumba, their first democratically elected president. Lumumba promised to kick out the westerners and share the Congo’s wealth with its citizens. The western world panicked, especially the Belgians as they were large shareholders in the exploitation industry.

Belgian mercenaries kidnapped Lumumba, tortured him, took him out of the game with a bullet then hacked hacked hacked and tossed the pieces in a vat of acid. If we’re to believe the reports, one guy took a tooth as a souvenir. Lumumba was the Congo’s one viable hope of getting the country on track but those dreams were quickly subdued by European killers*.

*For more details about this type of imperial tyranny and the overthrow of democratically elected officials, see my review of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

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.

With their one hope of sovereignty lost the Congolese have been at the whim of foreign exploitation for as long as anyone can remember. A history of foreign intervention is to blame, a stunningly ineffective and corrupt government plays its role, as does skyrocketing demand for cobalt coming primarily from the electric car industry. While cobalt has always been used in consumer devices like iPhones and laptops, electric cars are the primary driver of demand for this highly sought after metal.

The battery packs in electric vehicles require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than one thousand times the amount required for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050.

We can say with a high degree of certainty that nearly every battery pack in an EV contains some amount of cobalt mined by hand in the Congo, likely by children since they represent an increasing part of the workforce since Covid. Do the EV companies know that ten year olds are getting crushed to death or catching cancer from the toxic sometimes even radioactive soil they dig? Yes, they know...

Consumer-facing tech and EV companies, mining companies, and other stakeholders in the cobalt chain invariably point their fingers downstream, even at their own subsidiaries, as if doing so somehow severs their responsibility for what is happening in the cobalt mines of the Congo.

Cobalt is such a crucial ingredient that there is no way the executives don’t understand what’s happening in the Congo. When confronted the companies hide behind bland statements about “commitments” and whatever other corporate rubbish the lawyers draft up. Despite the denials, there are people at every large tech/EV company who know the hellish Congo but are incentivized to let it happen since artisanal miners are cheap labor and produce the highest concentration of mined cobalt.

Artisanal mining techniques can yield up to ten or fifteen times a higher grade of cobalt per ton than industrial mining can. This is the primary reason that many industrial copper-cobalt mines in the DRC informally allow artisanal mining to take place on their concessions.

I should point out, however, that although western corporations are benefiting from this inconceivable atrocity, there are no major western mining companies left in the country and the direct assault is being led by the Chinese.

The small depots that buy cobalt directly from the artisanal miners are mostly run by Chinese workers. The large Chinese mining companies knowingly buy the child-mined cobalt from the depots, and the firms allow and even encourage artisanal miners of all ages to work on company land. According to Cobalt Red, the Congolese feel that however bad the westerners were, the China are an even worse plague on the country.

Is there a solution?

So called “commitments,” “reform programs” and “model mining sites” are meaningless corporate speak which large companies hide behind so they don’t have to make any changes. The Congo is a long ways away, most people can’t find it on a map and the entire approach to this issue is out of sight, out of mind.

The harsh realities of cobalt mining in the Congo are an inconvenience to every stakeholder in the chain. No company wants to concede that the rechargeable batteries used to power smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles contain cobalt mined by peasants and children in hazardous conditions. - 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.

That’s why I am proposing an out of the box solution that could easily be funded by a single billionaire philanthropist. To affect change we must ditch the ineffective reform programs and focus on the foundational problem: the artisanal miners are unable to share their existence with the world. Earning a dollar or two a day and living in homes without electricity, the people enabling the smartphone revolution cannot afford the fruits of their labor. Let’s change that.

I believe the fastest way to force change would be to distribute millions of smartphones to artisanal miners, their friends and family too. Give everyone a portable charging unit, a smartphone and lessons in using social media. Congolese children continue to be maimed in mining accidents because the tunnel collapses never makes the evening news. Despite its colossal list of faults, social media remains a public forum where people can draw attention to injustice and force faceless corporations to contend with their actions.

While the current status of the Congo is hell on earth, there is a hopeful message in that this is not an unsolvable problem. Solutions exist and could be quickly implemented if the right people demanded action.

Conclusions

Don’t read Cobalt Red if you have an EV and like feeling good about your purchase, this is not the book for you. For the rest of you, well, if you’ve been feeling too happy lately and want to vacation with the worst aspects of humanity, Cobalt Red is just what you’re looking for.

The book is well-written, concise and bursting with stories of loss, bravery and intense grief. Hell, maybe you don’t care about that and you only want to know how the largest cobalt mines in the world operate. Well, Cobalt Red will explain that too. Come for the horror, stay for the geology. The road to Kolwezi, the epicenter of Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, doesn’t discriminate.

As we will discover with each passing mile on the road to Kolwezi, the rechargeable battery revolution has unleashed a malevolent force upon the Congo that tramples all in its path in a merciless hunt for cobalt.