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

Product Information

Samsung has a zero-tolerance policy against child labor as prohibited by international standards and relevant national laws and regulations in all stages of its global operations. Everything is carefully “washed” like a crime lord filtering dirty money so they can say they are not part of the problem.

That is because the Congo enjoys rock with a staggering concentration of cobalt, with some of the rock (Heterogenite) containing up to 20% purity in some places. Everyone who has a mobile phone, charger or battery should listen to or read this book to understand the cost to other people's lives in contributing to our entitled consumer desires to have the latest technology.

Billions of us relied, more than ever, on our rechargeable batteries to continue remote working and schooling. The supply chains themselves of cobalt are all mixed together from industrial “child-labor” free mines and artisanal mines so the entire industry uses child labor. At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefited in any meaningful way from the monetization of their country’s resources.

Foreign powers have penetrated every inch of this nation to extract its rich supplies of ivory, palm oil, diamonds, timber, rubber … and to make slaves of its people. The increased demand for cobalt pressured hundreds of thousands of Congolese peasants who could not survive without the dollar or two they earned each day to clamber into the ditches and tunnels, unprotected, to keep the cobalt flowing. Kara, who traveled the country, entering mines and speaking to workers at every level of the labor chain, exposes slavery, child labor, forced labor, and other ongoing horrors and crimes. These procedures are especially important in the Congo, where the dangers of speaking to outsiders cannot be overstated.

After all, who was going to go all the way to the West Indies and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them? Governments offered commercial entities the rights to mine minerals from a parcel of land in exchange for a portion of revenues, a system that continues to this day. The batteries in almost every smartphone, tablet, laptop, and electric vehicle made today cannot recharge without Kolwezi.

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+). Despite helping to generate untold riches for major technology and car companies, most artisanal cobalt miners earn paltry incomes between one or two dollars per day. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. The equator transects the top third of the Congo, and when it is the rainy season on one side of the equator, it is the dry season on the other.Automakers are rapidly increasing production of electric vehicles in tandem with governmental efforts to reduce carbon emissions emerging from the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015. T HE SOLDIERS ARE WILD and wide-eyed as they point their weapons at the villagers trying to enter the mining area at Kamilombe. If they didn’t contract the virus and share it with their family causing death, they still stopped their education to provide for US.

They espoused the great humanity of the slave trade—Africans were not suffering, they were being “saved” from the savagery of the dark continent. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. The region is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium. The author makes governments around the world who sign up to the Net Zero/Just Transition farce look like the con artists they really are. In fact, no one seems to accept responsibility at all for the negative consequences of cobalt mining in the Congo—not the Congolese government, not foreign mining companies, not battery manufacturers, and certainly not mega-cap tech and car companies.The mines in Congo represent a hierarchy of exploitation from every level to the top where the level below is exploited by the level above in a long series of steps in its supply chain. Aside from this, the land of the Congo is destroyed by toxic runoff chemicals from mining operations. Siddharth Kara (Sociology and Social Policy) is part of the Rights Lab's Measurement and Geographies Programme and is a British Academy Global Professor (2020-2024). They fear tunnel collapsing, working in radioactive water, and speaking out against their meagre wages.