An informative, somber and haunting read that puts things into perspective.

I started Cobalt Red with an idea of what the book is about, but I had no idea exactly what I would come across in those pages. Until turning the last page, I did not know the suffering that the Congolese people have to endure and how lucky we all are, living in the Western world. In Congo, the only way for many people to make a living and put food on the table is to work at cobalt mines or be an artisanal digger (like a freelancing miner). The higher quality an ore is, the more money miners will get. Congo is blessed or cursed, depending on whom you ask, with a lot of cobalt and other rare minerals. To the point that miners can dig out ores even with primitive tools. However, cobalt that is accessible on the ground surface has lower quality. To get great cobalt, miners have to go into tunnels which are built with insufficient safety measures. As a consequence, tunnel collapses happen and when that happens, it either takes lives or alters them forever.

The worse aspect of this tragedy is the involvement of children. Young children are forced to help parents by working at the mines. At first, they are only allowed to work on the ground. When they are older and stronger, they move to work under the tunnels for higher wages. Childhood is lost and often so are young lives. The book discusses many tragic cases where parents lost their offsprings and children or teenagers suffer horrible injuries, so much that it’s hard to read at times.

And there is seemingly no light at the end of the figurative tunnel. No pun intended. The government in Congo doesn’t have a system in place to leverage the rich natural resources into better lives for its citizens. Meanwhile, Western and Chinese corporations are incentivized to keep wages and compensation for Congolese workers as low as possible. It doesn’t matter how much non-profit organizations want to do good. As long as those up the supply chain and the local governments don’t commit to benefitting the poor people in Congo, no change will happen.

I worked through this book at the end of 2023, the time when people reflect on the past and think about the future. Cobalt Red makes me appreciate my life even more. Every day, no matter how bad the day will be, I will still have a roof on my head, food on my table and security. These things sound basic, but are a luxury for the people in Congo. How can you complain about trivial things after reading about unthinkable suffering by the Congolese?

I want to give a shoutout to the author. An investigative piece like this requires an author to spend time on the ground and uncover as much as possible. In a place like Congo and at cobalt mines where people have interest in hiding the truth, it can be dangerous at times. The world should learn about what happens in Congo and only thanks to Siddharth Kara’s dedication is the inhumane suffering exposed. I thank him for that.

“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+). The developments that sparked demand for each resource attracted a new wave of treasure seekers. 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 those resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering.”

“Despite being home to trillions of dollars in untapped mineral deposits, the DRC’s entire national budget in 2021 was a scant $7.2 billion, similar to the state of Idaho, which has one-fiftieth the population. The DRC ranks 175 out of 189 on the United Nations Human Development Index. More than three-fourths of the population live below the poverty line, one-third suffer from food insecurity, life expectancy is only 60.7 years, child mortality ranks eleventh worst in the world, access to clean drinking water is only 26 percent, and electrification is only 9 percent.”

“A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.”

“There was nothing to stop mining companies from going to the artisanal sites themselves and directly paying the women, men, and children who dug their cobalt—aside from the negative optics associated with having direct links to hazardous, penny-wage artisanal mining areas teeming with children.”

“It seemed that on any given day, a poor family in the Congo almost always needed income first and education second or not at all. Food, medicine, repairs to a hut, or any other expense required that every member of a family earned whatever they could, including the children. The dividends of an education were too theoretical and too far into the future for those who survived day-to-day, especially when the schools lacked the support they needed to provide an adequate education. It was no wonder that impoverished families across the Congo’s mining provinces relied on child labor to survive. At times, it felt like cobalt stakeholders up the chain counted on it. Why help build schools or fund proper education for Congolese children living in mining communities, when the children could just dig up cobalt for pennies instead?”

“If a boss paid the children who worked for him about $1.10 per sack of heterogenite that weighed thirty kilograms, he would sell each sack to the cooperatives for $7 or $8, earning him roughly $6 or $7 in profit per sack. From this point forward the value chain became murky, as there was very little transparency as to the pricing of cobalt up the chain until it reached the London Metal Exchange (LME), which sets the global market price for fully refined cobalt. What I was able to piece together is that most mining cooperatives (and depots) on average sold ore with a 2 or 3 percent grade of cobalt to industrial mining companies in the DRC for a price that was roughly 15–20 percent of the price of refined cobalt on the LME. Hence, if a kilogram of refined cobalt on the LME sold for $60, then cooperatives would sell cobalt-containing ore for $9–$12 per kilogram. Bearing in mind that they probably bought thirty kilograms of said ore for $8, the cooperatives emerged from the system as massive profit-generating businesses. These profits largely went into the pockets of their owners, who tended to be business leaders or government officials”

“Lubo worked at Tilwezembe digging the tunnel for more than one month. Every day I prayed that he would return home safe. My arm was almost better. I thought in a few days I will be able to work again and Lubo can return to school.

On January 18 [2019], Lubo did not come home from Tilwezembe. I ran to the mine. When I arrived, other parents were already there. Everyone was shouting, “Where is my son? Give me my son!” The soldiers pushed their guns in our faces and forced us to return home. I was going crazy. I wanted to know what happened to Lubo! I walked up and down the road. I went back to the mine and pleaded with the soldiers, “Please let me find my son,” but they beat me and kicked me.

I stayed in the trees near the mine all night, and I went back in the morning. All the parents came back. There was so much shouting. The soldiers said they would shoot us. Then an official from CMKK came to the mine in a jeep. He told us to keep quiet and he will explain what happened. He said a tunnel had collapsed the previous day, He said no one survived

“The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains”

“The translator for my interviews, Augustin, was distraught after several days of trying to find the words in English that captured the grief being described in Swahili. He would at times drop his head and sob before attempting to translate what was said. As we parted ways, Augustin had this to say, “Please tell the people in your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones.”

“When the diggers at Kamilombe unearthed the body of the first crushed corpse, such wails went forth as if to signal the final flight of hope from the earth. Two men lifted a child out of the dirt and laid him gently on the ocher gravel. His bloodied face was locked in a macabre expression of terror. His slender frame was stained with a paste of dirt and blood, the color of burnt umber or rusted metal. The boy looked no older than fifteen, a brief life aborted in the most wretched manner imaginable. Hearing secondhand testimonies was one thing, but when I finally saw the tragic consequences of a tunnel collapse with my own eyes, it was utterly devastating.

Sixty-three men and boys were buried alive in a tunnel collapse at Kamilombe on September 21, 2019. Only four of the sixty-three bodies were recovered. The others would remain forever interred in their final poses of horror. No one has ever accepted responsibility for these deaths. The accident has never even been acknowledged.

This was the final truth of cobalt mining in the Congo: the life of a child buried alive while digging for cobalt counted for nothing. All the dead here counted for nothing. The loot is all