By ERWIN FREED
“There is a frenzy taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a manic race to extract as much cobalt as quickly as possible. This rare, silvery metal is an essential component to almost every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today. It is also used in a wide array of emerging low-carbon innovations that are critical to the achievement of climate sustainability goals. The Katanga region in the southeastern corner of the Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined…
“The deposits were always there, resting dormant for eons before foreign economies made the dirt valuable. Industrial innovations sparked demand for one metal after another, and somehow they all happened to be in Katanga. The remainder of the Congo is similarly bursting with natural 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. Few nations are blessed with a more diverse abundance of resource riches than the Congo. No country in the world has been more severely exploited.”
Siddharth Kara’s 2023 book “Cobalt Red” is an urgent exposé on the horrors of imperialism in the Congo today. Kara, an investment banker turned investigative reporter, first went to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to begin researching for the book in 2018. The book provides an eyewitness account of the sheer brutality that is fundamental to mining cobalt in the Katanga region, where the mineral is very abundant, alongside historical and political-economic tangents that help to contextualize the role of past colonization and ongoing super-exploitation by major corporations. “Cobalt Red” traces the labor and financial processes involved with the extraction, refinement, and end-use of the mineral.
The book begins with a mine collapse at the mining area at Kamilombe. Kara is drawn to a commotion and realizes that a crowd has formed around the corpse of a dead child who was pulled out of the rubble. Soldiers, who guard the mines and are ever-present throughout Kara’s time in DRC, yell at the gathered onlookers and point a gun at the author. He counterposes this stark reality to the assurances of “ethical mining” given by some of the world’s largest companies, pointing out, “The harsh realities of cobalt mining in the Congo are an inconvenience to every stakeholder in the chain. … In public disclosures and press releases, the corporations perched atop the cobalt chain typically cite their commitments to international human rights norms, zero-tolerance policies on child labor, and adherence to the highest standards of supply chain due diligence.”
As “Cobalt Red” makes very clear, none of these conditions are upheld, and all the statements are examples of the cynicism and hypocrisy of capital.
Why cobalt? Why DRC? What are the conditions?
One of the big strengths of “Cobalt Red” is the necessary historical and economic contexts in which Kara situates his investigations. He explains how cobalt is a necessary component in all lithium-ion batteries (and even gives some details on the science involved) as well as the development and upswings of those technologies.
There are two main general areas where cobalt is used. First, the lithium-ion battery is what is used in virtually all rechargeable consumer electronics. Between smartphones, laptops, e-bikes, and a myriad of other products, “the aggregate amount of cobalt needed from all devices, save those with four or more tires, adds up to tens of thousands of tons each year.”
Second, an even larger end-product for cobalt is the electric vehicle (EV) market. This is particularly important because of the relatively large amount of cobalt necessary and the basic fact that EVs are the main climate “solution” on offer from capitalists. Ultimately, to meet the projections for EV production made in the Paris Accords and EV30@30 would mean that “millions of tons of cobalt will be needed, which will continue to push hundreds of thousands of Congolese women, men, and children into hazardous pits and tunnels to help meet demand.”
The DRC, specifically the southwest Katanga Province, is estimated to be home to around half of the world’s cobalt deposits, about 3.5 million tons. It is very prevalent and “found in massive, shallow, high-grade deposits.” Kara quotes a geologist, Murray Hitzman, as stating, “The cobalt-hydroxide ore bodies in Katanga are unique. They form blocks that can be tens of meters to several kilometers in length floating like raisins in a cake.”
Instead of investing in modern mining equipment and basic safety standards, cobalt is mined largely by individuals in families, with rudimentary tools like hand shovels and rebar. Large open pits see tens of thousands of people working from before dawn until after dusk in back breaking labor.
Where cobalt deposits exist further below the surface, narrow mine shafts are dug. These shafts can go many feet into the ground with dozens of people working in them. They are virtually all unreinforced, meaning that they are prone to collapse. Basic safety procedures are impossible to follow due to a lack of resources. This “cost-saving” appears on the one hand in big profits for major corporations and banks and on the other in the spilt blood and broken bones of Congolese workers.
A normal day in the mines consists of filling sacks with as much mineral as possible, washing the rocks by hand in the streams, and bringing them to middlemen to be sold to other middlemen. Virtually all of the profits of these workers’ labor is captured by “stronger” economies like China and the United States. In as much as any of this value is redistributed through state programs—or even “philanthropy”—it is done far away from the DRC.
Kara writes: “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.
“Education is supposed to be funded by the state until eighteen years of age, but schools and teachers are under-supported and forced to charge fees of five or six dollars per month to cover expenses, a sum that millions of people in the DRC cannot afford. Consequently, countless children are compelled to work to support their families, especially in the mining provinces.”
Due to underdevelopment and complete disregard for human and natural life in the mining regions, the health of workers and environments are sacrificed for cobalt profits. A researcher at the University of Lumumbashi named Germain wrote a paper quoted by Kara which reads in part: “In the studies we conducted, the artisanal miners have more than forty times the amount of cobalt in their urine as the control groups. They also have five times the level of lead and four times the level of uranium. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.…
“The mining companies do not control the runoff of effluents from their processing operations. They do not clean up when they have chemical spills. Toxic dust and gases from mining plants and diesel equipment spreads for many kilometers and are inhaled by the local population. The mining companies have polluted the entire region. All the crops, animals, and fish stocks are contaminated.”
Labor in the cobalt economy
Congolese workers are forced into perhaps the most deplorable conditions on the planet. As Kara details, the incredible natural wealth of the Congo has been a “jewel” passed around by colonizers and imperialists for over 150 years. That jewel is paid for in the blood and lives of the area’s peoples. Common touch points include the reign of King Leopold II, who is thought to have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and brutalized many more, and the CIA backed assassination of democratically elected pan-Africanist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961.
One of the big corporate lies that Kara exposes is the porousness between “formal” and “informal” cobalt mines. Workers in the “informal” sector “are assigned the quaint term artisanal miners, and they toil in a shadowy substrate of the global mining industry called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM).”
Kara warns: “Do not be fooled by the word artisanal into thinking that ASM involves pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans. Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools and work in hazardous conditions to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions. There are usually no avenues to seek assistance for injuries or redress for abuse. Artisanal miners are almost always paid paltry wages on a piece-rate basis and must assume all risks of injury, illness, or death.
“Although ASM is fraught with hazardous conditions, the sector has been growing rapidly. There are roughly forty-five million people around the world directly involved in ASM, which represents an astonishing 90 percent of the world’s total mining workforce. Despite the many advancements in machinery and techniques, the formal mining industry relies heavily on the hard labor of artisanal miners to boost production at minimal expense. The contributions from ASM are substantial, including 26 percent of the global supply of tantalum, 25 percent of tin and gold, 20 percent of diamonds, 80 percent of sapphires, and up to 30 percent of cobalt [which Kara later believes is an undercount].”
Only 2.5 percent of Congolese workers are in the “formal” economy, according to Joséphine Shimbi Umba, the vice president of gender, the informal economy, and finance at the Trade Union Confederation of Congo.
There is virtually no regulation of mining by the DRC, and Kara exposes again and again how the “responsible sourcing” labels that big companies use are blatant lies. Even the “model mines” are places where, in the words of miner Josué, “we work in our graves.”
Where there are “regulations,” these are used to further dispossess the workers. For example, miners (also known as creuseurs) are forced to hand the products of their labor to négociants, who then bring the sacks of cobalt for sale to comptoirs. Licensing for both transport and sale of cobalt is prohibitively expensive so workers are unable to sell directly to comptoirs, and Congolese nationals have difficulty raising the funds to become comptoirs. Kara found that most comptoirs, who are the final stop before larger amounts of cobalt collected from all sources are trucked to shipping points and the international market, are largely Chinese immigrants.
In the final chapter of “Cobalt Red,” Kara visits the Kamilombe cobalt mine, run by Coopérative Minière pour le Développement Social, which partners with the “Fair Cobalt Alliance”—an international NGO that gives its stamp of approval for buyers in the global supply chain. On arriving at Kamilombe, Kara immediately hears cries of “Éboulement. Collapse!” He explains, “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.”
Prevalence of China; dangers of inter-imperialist fights
U.S. companies virtually pulled out of Katanga and DRC cobalt mining in 2016 when Phoenix-based Freeport sold its stake in Tenke Fungurum, the largest mining concession in Congo, to China Molybdenum (CMOC) for $2.65 billion. While U.S. companies are not directly involved in mining cobalt, they still continue to reap the super-profits of hyper-exploited semi-slave labor in the Congo. Massive corporations like Apple, GE, and General Motors are all drenched in Congolese blood. Chinese companies are dominant in the global cobalt supply chain. Beyond pure ownership, the picture that Kara paints of Chinese middlemen, business owners, and bureaucrats in the DRC is reminiscent of other and earlier forms of colonial domination.
Employment with the large mining firms or setting up shop as négociants appears to be effectively creating a community of Chinese settlers with a specific interest in maintaining the dominance of their mother country and continued subordination of native communities. One example of the colonizing mindset developing among Chinese immigrants in the DCR is given during an interview with a mid-level manager of Congo DongFang Mining (CDM), referred to as Hu. Hu goes on a tirade about “lazy Africans” that sounds like it could have come out of the letters or diaries of any European settler in “the colonies.”
In addition, there is effective segregation between Chinese and Congolese, with the former refusing to even eat food cooked by the latter. Kara notes on the location in which the above interview took place, “Congolese people were not allowed inside the club, except when the strippers arrived around 9:00 p.m.”
The current dominance of China in Katanga and the cobalt supply chain generally is not only solidifying China’s role as an imperialist power, it is also likely to become a center of conflict between China and the United States. Kara points to internal political disputes within the Congolese ruling elite concerning which imperialist they should align with. Kara explains this rift at the level of DRC presidents, saying that “a power struggle has since ensued between [current President Félix] Tshisekedi and [predecessor Joseph] Kabila. Tshisekedi is perceived as trying to align the country closer to the U.S., whereas Kabila is fighting to maintain links to China.”
Since becoming president, Tshisekedi has begun new investigations into mining contracts signed with Chinese companies during Kabila’s term. However, the game being played is dangerous in two major ways. The most obvious way is that the United States has a long history of parasitic, violent relationships with the Congo—from helping to murder Patrice Lumumba to backing to the hilt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. There is absolutely no reason to think, as does former U.S. ambassador to the DRC Mike Hammer, that “American investment … brings better jobs, delivers for local communities, and respects the environment.” Second, Chinese corporations and their state are not going to simply give up what could end up being some of their most profitable and fast growing growth sectors. The imperialists will go to war before they allow the riches of the DRC to change hands. This is something that Kara could be more explicit about in his book.
Africa key to world revolution
“Cobalt Red” is an essential text for exposing the hypocrisy and violence underpinning the capitalist system. Congolese cobalt workers sit at the intersection of one of the most brutal labor regimes in the world and one of the most essential industries for global production.
Author Siddharth Kara gives a useful general historic overview of colonial and imperialist domination in the DRC from the 19th century to today. Beyond this basic information and between the lines, however, there is a takeaway that Kara ultimately does not provide. That is the central role that Africa as a whole plays in the world revolution and struggle for socialism.
Kara shows a long history of inter-imperial, regional, and Cold War Great Power conflicts developing within the DRC that can be extended in important ways to the continent as a whole. However, the book provides no discussion of the working-class and anti-imperialist struggles in the region, which won formal independence, democratic revolutions, and smashed apartheid. These histories and ongoing struggles are necessary to see beyond the so-called “international community” represented by the UN, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and similar tools of maintaining the domination of “weak” countries by the “strong.”
“Cobalt Red” exposes the hypocrisy of giant capitalist corporations and their regulators, but it does not go all the way. In the end, the book does not present a solution to Congolese workers other than through those same imperialist institutions that are raking in profits through forcing them to “work in their graves.” Instead, what is necessary is looking at the lessons of struggles against imperialism and for miners’ rights and the development of fighting organizations on a continental scale and international scale.
