Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

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The harsh realities of cobalt mining in the Congo are an inconvenience to every stakeholder in the chain. Furthermore, the inevitable outcome of a lawless scramble for cobalt in an impoverished and war-torn country can only be the complete dehumanization of the people exploited at the bottom of the chain. The flow of minerals and money is further obscured by a web of shady connections between foreign mining companies and Congolese political leaders, some of whom have become scandalously rich auctioning the country’s mining concessions while tens of millions of Congolese people suffer extreme poverty, food insecurity, and civil strife. The crescent shape of the Congo River makes it the only one in the world that crosses the equator twice.

In COBALT RED, Siddharth Kara provides an intense account of cobalt mining in the Congo, where three-fourths of the world’s cobalt is hand-mined in dangerous and toxic conditions by thousands of men, women, and children for one or two dollars a day.Those solutions will only have meaning if the fictions promulgated by corporate stakeholders about the conditions under which cobalt is mined in the Congo are replaced by the realities experienced by the miners themselves. Although the copious mineral riches of Katanga could easily fund numerous programs to improve child education, alleviate child mortality, upgrade sanitation and public health, and expand electrification for the Congolese people, most of the mineral wealth flows out of the country. The idea that my phone has caused the death of a child in Congo is not only abhorrent, but devastating to me.

His reporting on how the dangerous, ill-paid labor of Congo children provides a mineral essential to our cellphones will break your heart. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

The deposits were always there, resting dormant for eons before foreign economies made the dirt valuable. You will meet the artisanal, small scale miners who dig up the ore and sell it to a middleman for little money. Kolwezi, like the rest of the Congolese Copper Belt, is a land scarred by the mad scramble to feed cobalt up the chain into the hands of consumers across the globe. This is an incredibly important book, especially because we are all ultimately responsible for this travesty.