“Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives”: A Book Review

Your iPhone, Kindle, and EV: Conrad-level evil inside?

In Cobalt Red, researcher-activist Siddharth Kara offers searing but credible revelations about cobalt mining practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I live in Alexandria, Virginia, 6,500 miles from the capital of Kinshasa, but in a friendly way, I take his much-needed discoveries very personally.

People here tend to be pro-green despite or maybe because of the traffic jams and air pollution from gross overdevelopment. At least 14 buses are electrified. Their batteries almost surely use cobalt to stretch out the time between recharges. I drive a gas-powered Honda Fit, but I’m an ebook booster and own an iPhone, iPad, Samsung tablet, and several Kindles, all with cobalt likely tainting their batteries. So the subtitle of the Kara book still applies to me: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. The Congolese each year dig up more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt supply. Despite talk of production ramping up at other locations, it isn’t as if DRC will lose its spot soon as #1 - Cobalt Central, so to speak. Circumstances may change, but for now, manufacturers typically need cobalt to meet the burgeoning demand for electric vehicles.

Making Kara’s cobalt exposé still more personal for me, I can recall encouraging an author-publisher named Joe Biel to investigate the sourcing of minerals used in Kindle batteries. Amazon’s online information was too vague. Joe’s draft for my TeleRead ebook blog in 2016 won me over, and he and I wrote Amnesty International for specifics about the company so we could pin down the facts for a final version. No luck. The human rights group was already aware of the cobalt issue but said it lacked the resources to investigate Amazon in particular.

Mea culpa! I should have made the time to do a lot more Googling to find other activists in the Congo who might be able to check out the Kindle-related possibilities for us. Despite the day-to-day pressures of running TeleRead while helping attend to my cancer-stricken wife and addressing my own cardiac issues, I should have at least published questions about sourcing for the iPhone and other devices used to read ebooks. Meanwhile, I read soothing statements from big-name Silicon Valley firms assuring the world that everything was copacetic. I doubted that. But what to do about my own shortage of time when Carly was slowly dying of pancreatic cancer? For what it’s worth, at least some of the Valley’s do-no-evil tech barons claimed they had arranged with people onsite in the Congo to scrutinize the minerals’ suppliers effectively.

Wrong – or at least highly misleading! Kara makes a stronger case than ever against the falsehoods, thanks to his daring work on the scene, where AK-47-toting guards could easily have killed him if he rubbed them the wrong way. He Velcroed his passport to his calf muscle for possible fast escapes. With his East Indian ethnicity, Kara blended in far more easily than he would have otherwise, given the number of Indians in Africa working in the hotel industry or as traders. Kara instead is an adjutant lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an associate professor at the University of Nottingham and a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Simply put, I’d trust Kara and his book a thousand times over a “white paper” or another cover-up document from one of the Valley’s PR mills. Intel, Apple, Dell, and the rest aren’t committing the abuses directly, but they have been enablers of damaging canards. To let the truth win out, Kara has suggestions, which I’ll share later on, and I’ll add my own in areas far beyond PR. No infallibility claimed, especially from so far away from the DRC. But ideally, my ideas can be useful at least as discussion-starters. Now back to Kara’s book.

The horrific mining conditions Kara depicts in the Congo are in many ways as bad as the horrors in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild’s landmark history. Kara did not witness overseers chopping off workers’ hands because the Congolese failed to meet rubber quotas. But we do learn of deadly mine cave-ins and of a boy shot in the back because he wanted to get a better price for his cobalt from other buyers. Cobalt Red begins with a young fatality from a mining accident, lying amid dusty gravel. “Until this moment,” Kara writes, “I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermilion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it.” By one estimate, 40,000 of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt are children, and some are just six years old. Even pregnant women - babies strapped to their backs - work amid toxins. Rape is a familiar worry for many female miners. Not so coincidentally, Kara has written three earlier books on modern forms of enslavement, and just as children in other parts of the Congo may be spirited away by sex traffickers, so may they end up in the cobalt mines.

As Kara saw first-hand, during his visits to the mines and surrounding towns, virtually all of the cobalt ends up tainted. Even if produced in “industrialized” surroundings, the cobalt will be almost always be mixed with the “artisanal” variety dug up with picks and other low-tech tools. Workers typically are paid just a dollar or two a day and children may have to toil for free as bonus slaves, so to speak. In supposed model mines, child laborers are swinging their picks. Furthermore, schooling can be a novelty. Why distract children who instead could be in the mines, risking cave-ins and poisoning? Masks, gloves, and other gear to protect lungs and other organs are rare – all the more outrageous, since the costs would be a pittance compared to the torrents of riches from the mines.

The Chinese control most of the Congolese cobalt industry, but it isn’t as if the other players are treating workers well or even paying their fair share of taxes. Compounding the problem, the industry has often squeezed out the rest of the world, and not just in terms of work opportunities. Many thousands of Congolese have lost their homes to expanding mines. Thanks to the filthy water and air, they may not be able to fish or hunt any longer.

Appalled by Corporate America’s 19th-century callousness, Kara calls for accountability from Silicon Valley. On a Joe Rogan podcast (a link to part of it appears below), Kara said he’d welcome top executives jetting off to the Congo for a closer look at the abusive practices. I’m just worried that the usual suspects - assuming they could even briefly tear themselves away from their AI and metaverse ambitions - would simply turn the visits into PR stunts. Such possibilities apparently are also on Kara’s own mind. In Cobalt Red, he says: “Rather than issue vacant statements on zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR, corporations should do the one simple thing that would truly help: treat the artisanal miners as equal employees to the people who work at corporate headquarters. We would not send the children of Cupertino to scrounge for cobalt in toxic pits, so why is it permissible to send the children of the Congo? We would not accept blanket press statements about how those children were being treated without independently verifying it, so why don’t we do it in the Congo? We would not treat our hometowns like toxic dumping grounds, so why do we allow it in the Congo? If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal miners would be done.”

A wonderful vision! But given the high-tech industry’s oft-cruel treatment of even domestic contract workers, I’m not optimistic. Likewise, I wonder about the effectiveness of measures that mining companies say they are taking, such as a supposedly ethical trading center for artisanal miners to sell their cobalt - it’s too far from the mines. 

Despite my horror over the Valley and the cobalt industry’s darker sides, I’m fervently pro-tech in countless ways. The hero of my child soldier novel is a brilliant autodidact who uses the Internet, YouTube, you name it, to improve himself (and in time the DRC through his philanthropy). I love my gadgets, just as my Congolese contacts do. I simply don’t trust Silicon Valley or mining companies to do enough on their own to effect genuine reforms in the Congo.

Instead, I suggest that Congolese activists reach out to civil rights groups in the US to help educate President Biden and others, especially Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. All US electric vehicles in time should carry certification that they come from mines without child labor or starvation wages; and I applaud talk in Congress of such possibilities. An absolutely essential requirement should be the protective gear that Kara calls for. To confirm adherence to these rules in the DRC, the US and allies in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere ideally could work with the Congolese to deploy well-trained, ethical inspectors who would be accompanied by armed guards. All this would not be free, but still a good, humane way to at least somewhat reduce the chances of the DRC becoming a Chinese satellite, another Afghanistan, or simply even more of a poverty-stricken place. Americans do have one strategic advantage. So many Chinese consider the Congolese to be subhuman, and Kara says many don’t even want to eat with them - apparently for racial reasons, not just sanitary ones. Here’s a chance for Black Americans and others from the US to show how different we can be (with notable exceptions, of course, such as Donald “S—hole Countries” Trump).

Americans and allies could also provide other assistance in such important areas as tax collection advice - no small detail, considering that the per capita GDP per Congolese is less than $600 a year, thanks partly to the current outflow to foreign mineral barons and other dispensers of bribes. Let’s see the mineral wealth distributed more appropriately. A big Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund, transparent and well-audited to discourage theft, could go a long way. No, we’re not talking about Scandinavian-level living standards for the Congolese tomorrow, but at least a major increase in expenditures on education, transportation, health, and other basics. Cobalt miners are just a fraction of the DRC’s 97 million people, but raw cobalt and other minerals still in the ground could be worth as much as $23 trillion. Ideally, the government could get its share for a truly sizable wealth fund. For the central government itself, the total national budget is only about $16 billion or approximately one-fifth of Virginia’s. What’s more, the DRC’s existing sovereign wealth fund is a long way from Norway’s in size and transparency.

With or without US help, could the Congo enjoy new stability and prosperity with more reforms and better governance in general? That could be the fly in the ointment. The bad guys want chaos so the place is ungovernable. Reforms might actually encourage murderous militia groups to sprout up. Keep in mind the Congo’s history. Millions have died during wars in the DRC, and neighboring countries like Rwanda and Uganda have fanned the flames and themselves plundered the DRC. They’d probably love to see the Democratic Republic of the Congo fall apart so they could tear off pieces, especially those with mineral wealth. As if all this isn’t enough, the Chinese cozied up to Joseph Kabila, a corrupt predecessor of President Felix Tshisekedi, and they almost surely will push for Kabila to win the December 2023 election. Granted,Tshisekedi himself comes with major flaws; serious questions have arisen about election integrity, for example. And many members of the Congolese military are directly benefiting from cobalt-related abuses and corruption - some even bully people into mine work. Has Tshisekedi done all he could to change this? Still, he or someone more palatable to Westerners, like Martin Fayulu or Moïse Katumbi, cares far more about the DRC’s autonomy than Kabila did in giving away so much of the national wealth to the Chinese and other outsiders.

No, the US should not send in thousands and thousands of troops and turn the DRC into Afghanistan, but if the Congolese are open to the idea of advisers in areas ranging from mine security to taxes, we and others should oblige. We could also encourage the Congolese to bring less cold-blooded managers and investors - regardless of Chinese companies’ opposition - into mining industries. Time for them to make pitches to the Norwegian fund and others like it?

Meanwhile, we need to promote improvements in health and countless other areas. Electric buses are wonderful for the air in Alexandria, but let’s not forget the toxins in the lungs of underpaid Congolese miners without even elemental protective gear. Props to Kara for caring and fearlessly acting toward an end to the barbarities!

Note: This book review/commentary is a “first edition,” subject to tweaking, and I’ll welcome feedback at davidrothman@pobox.com.

Related: Artisanal cobalt mining swallowing city in Democratic Republic of the Congo, satellite imagery shows, from ABC News.

News flash: Guess who just met with cobalt miners in the Congo. A Microsoft executive. From Reuters: “In the first known visit by a Microsoft (MSFT.O) executive to an artisanal cobalt site in Congo, chief of staff for tech and corporate responsibility Michele Burlington met miners at Mutoshi, where commodities trader Trafigura had helped run a formalisation scheme that ended in 2020.” She says that a “coalition” will be needed to end the human rights abuses. Hmm. Just a PR stunt or more? Hard to say at this point. But let’s give Burlington credit for at least being on the scene.

Report: Meanwhile here’s mention of an independent report - so it’s represented - calling for formal recognition of artisanal mining via a new initiative. It would increase miners’ safety, reduce child labor, and increase opportunities for women, the report says. PDF here. The author, Dorothée Baumann-Pauly of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights, accompanied Microsoft’s Burlington.

Key passage in the report: “Powerful economic forces attract destitute people to mining in areas that lack other means of making a living. Artisanal mining occurs in proximity to large-scale industrial operations because ASM miners are drawn to corporate mining concessions with proven cobalt reserves. ASM provides employment to hundreds of thousands of miners in the DRC and feeds millions when miners’ families are considered, according to Jean-Marie Tshizainga Sanama, the former Lualaba provincial minister of mines. In fact, ASM generates far more jobs in the DRC than large-scale mining, which relies heavily on machines rather than humans. The Congolese government supports ASM and is in the process of setting up an agency, the Entreprise Général du Cobalt (EGC), to oversee artisanal mining and the purchasing of domestically produced ASM cobalt ore prior to processing.Though the EGC was announced by the government in March 2021, it has been hampered by internal controversies which have prevented it from becoming operational for almost two years.”