Cobalt Red: How the Blood of Congo Powers our Lives
Batteries from a Battered Land
Cobalt Red
By Siddharth Kara
A battery is a device that stores charge in the form of chemical energy and converts it into electrical energy when used in an application. This we know. What we don't know is that this battery not only stores charge but also blood, sweat, tears and screams, tortured bodies, broken families, violent coercion, pathetic wages, and unrealized education and dreams.
Enter the heart of Africa - the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There is a frenzy taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a maniac 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, writes author Siddharth Kara in his book Cobalt Red.
The titanic companies that sell products containing Congolese cobalt are worth trillions, yet the people who dig their cobalt out of the ground eke out a base existence characterised by extreme poverty and immense suffering. They exist at the edge of human life in an environment that is treated like a toxic dumping ground by foreign mining companies. Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.
Having read and analysed Siddharth Kara's work on modern slavery before, I knew that Cobalt Red was not going to be an easy read at all. I was wrong. When I first read this a few months back, I was nearly traumatised. I usually finish reading a book in one go over a week's span. But for this, I had take a two-days break between every chapter. I couldn't quit altogether either because the words cobalt and Congo decided to stay put in my brain. Now, when I finally mustered enough courage to re-read the book to write a review, I realised that it hadn't gotten any easier. There were still times when I had to stop reading, close my eyes, take deep breaths and mentally curse the people responsible for the atrocities that are carefully hidden from the world. But for this book.
The author has most sensitively engaged the reader in this book, of horrors faced by their counterparts just because they happened to be born in the mineral-rich provinces of Congo. No sentence could have been better. There is only one illustration in the book, showing the cobalt supply chain from artisanal miners to consumers like us, but the words paint a picture too clear, so bloody and infused with human emotions (of both the author and the people he spoke to) that it will stay with you for a very long time.
"Climate alarmism overdone could lead to hopelessness and inaction," writes Vasudevan Mukunth, Science Editor at The Hindu and The Wire. It is easy to lose hope while reading a book of this kind. Look at the names of the chapters for instance: Here It Is Better Not to Be Born, Colony to the World, If We Do Not Dig, We Do Not Eat and We Work in Our Graves. But the author has ensured that despite injecting the pain and violence of the mines in Congo into the book, the reader does not feel completely doomed or blamed so badly that he/she gives in to the crisis and tosses the book away. Sure enough, it is distressing and disturbing but that it's supposed to be otherwise we would never know the terrible and unpayable price attached to our shiny gadgets and electronic vehicles. Cobalt Red serves to inform and get rid of the blindness that tech companies have infected consumers like us with - it sparks hope that if we know, we might act and we will act.
Accountability and responsibility are highlighted multiple times in the book. Think of it, everyday people like you and I are reminded to be accountable for the things we do everyday - be it a household chore or a PowerPoint presentation. But that is exactly what tech companies want to obliterate so that they can continue obliterating lives and landscapes while levelling up their profits. Accountability vanishes like morning mist in the Katangan hills as it travels through the supply chains that connect stone to phone and car.
Now for the rest of this blogpost, I have tried to make it complementary to the book, with pictures and facts about the people behind how this came to be, satellite images of the mines and so on. So this is technically not a conventional book review, but here's what:
Cobalt Red is a must-read for anyone who has every used a battery (it's in your phone).
Artisanal mining, has nothing to do with art. Imagine hordes of people wielding pickaxes and rebars, and using muscle strength to dig at stone. This group is mostly men and teenage boys. Now these stones of heterogenite, which contains cobalt and copper, are washed in ponds by women, girls and younger boys to remove the dirt from valuable cobalt. This is now filled in sacks. If I work very hard for 12 hours, I can fill one sack each day. No protective equipment and mostly barefoot. For VFX, imagine dust flying as the miners hack into the stone. The wash-water is dark and toxic: The lake is poison, mosquitoes don't drink the blood of people who work here. Everybody is bruised working to the bone. Now that is what you call artisanal mining.
Mining for critical metals like copper and cobalt does not take place all over Congo. It is concentrated in the Central African Copper Belt, which lies in two provinces of the DRC - Katanga and Lubumbashi.
A closer look at an extreme few of the mining sites:
Tenke Fungurume - largest mining concession in Congo.
Mashamba - children are trafficked to this mine by militia soldiers wielding rifles.
Kasulo (CDM model site) - I think those black circles are tunnels. Kasulo is a cemetery, no one knows how many people are buried here.
Apart from mining at the surface, artisanal miners are also forced to dig and work in tunnels for diminishing returns in income. Most tunnels don't have air pumps and the companies don't even bother to retrieve the bodies of miners trapped in a tunnel collapse. The tunnel is only ten meters from here. I walk by that place every day. I look down at the ground. [My son and my husband] are still there. They are under my feet.
Our children are dying like dogs. There is no count, no accountability even in death.
We work in our graves.Death and money are served together in Kasulo.
In Cobalt Red, the story is narrated from the southeast part of Congo, and the author takes us all the way to Kolwezi (the final truth), which is in the northwest direction, with horrors and misery building up at every mine en route.
Website screengrabs of the mining companies in Congo for some contrast:
Siddharth Kara also includes the human rights policy statements of Apple, Tesla and other in the book. They pay us so little. They take all our minerals, but they do not support the communities that live here. Eventually, there will be no place left in Congo for Congolese people, raw but closer to truth.
The book explains that cobalt has not been the only curse on Congo. By "geographical fluke", Congo is home to some of the largest supplies of almost every resource the world desired - ivory, rubber (for tyres after John Boyd Dunlop's pneumatic tyres came to the rescue of Karl Benz's invention), palm oil (the Lever Brothers behind the Unilever MNC also owe Congo), and metals like Cu, Zn, Ag, Ni, Sn, Co (for phones and EVs now) - even the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had uranium from Congo. At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefitted in any meaningful way from the monetisation of their country's resources. Rather, they have often served as a slave labour force for the extraction of those resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering.
Events leading upto and people who knowingly/unknowingly contributed to the maximum suffering:
David Livingstone - explored his way into the heart of Africa. Ironically he was a missionary working against slave trade but his journey opened up the way for more unapologetic and ruthless colonialism.
Henry Stanley - bullied his way through Africa and is famous for finding Livingstone.
King Leopold II - probably one of the worst humans to exist. Owned a chunk of Africa that was larger than his country Belgium. Cut off ears, nose, hands and feet of slaves of they didn't meet their rubber quota.
Omer Bodson - killed the African chief Mwenda Msiri in a "White Man's attempt to save the world".
E.D. Morel - this data guy discovered that exports from and imports to Leopold's Congo didn't tally, thus confirming human rights violations.
Roger Casement - went to Congo after Morel's book caused an uproar. Hence verified the crimes and Leopold was forced to cede Congo to Belgium. Later Casement was executed on grounds of high treason and homosexuality.
Only white men? Nope, these are the Congolese men in history:
Patrice Lumumba - freedom fighter and first PM of Congo after independence in 1960. He had a great vision for the country and was brutally killed for the very same reason, with support from the US and the UN to keep the minerals flowing.
Moise Tshombe - Katangan leader. Here it is important to note that the copper and the cobalt is concentrated in two provinces of DRC and Katanga is one of them. He wanted Katanga to be a separate country like Jinnah wanted of Pakistan.
Joseph Mobutu - Lumumba's Brutus. He had a hand in the killing of Patrice Lumumba. Ran Congo for three decades following Leopold's model.
Joseph Kasa-Vubu - became the president after Patrice Lumumba was murdered and was soon overthrown by Mobutu.
Power shifted from Mobutu after the Rwandan genocide. New and nasty leaders emerged.
Laurent Kabila - Became the President in 1997. Sold Congo to foreign mining companies.
Joseph Kabila - Laurent Kabila's son, also a money-maker.
Hope things take a turn for the better with:
Felix Tshisekedi - current President of DRC. Has even promised to stop deforestation as a part of climate goals.
The author relied on several guides during his trips to DRC. One of them said:
Please tell the people in your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones.
If you cannot read the book, I would highly recommend this video (a little more than an hour) in which Siddharth Kara speaks about his book:
While all of this is very overwhelming (it was for me), and it's not only Congo where artisanal miners' lives and the environment are being traded shortsightedly to achieve climate and energy transition goals. One thing I have always felt uncomfortable about is the lack of accountability in the pre-use and post-use life of any product. Be it a pen - we don't know which landfill or whale's tummy it's going to end up in, or a pair of airpods - we don't know where the hundreds of components in it came from. So I think it is paramount the we make both the supply chain and the waste management chain transparent. These obviously need major policy interventions.
At the day-to-day level and in this context, one thing we can do is extent the battery life of our electronic gadgets. Updating phones to the latest software, switching to dark mode and limiting screen time can help. Another unusual tip is removing the cover of your phone while charging as some covers can cause overheating, leading to reduced battery life. Also buying less electronic gadgets and maintaining them is a huge help to the planet and one's pocket. I am low-key proud of the fact that both my previous phone and my current phone are hand-me-down from my mum and my uncle and my laptop (on which I typed this blogpost) is seven years old. Planned obsolescence, that is designing products that break down sooner so that customers will have to buy them again should be called out.
These are tiny steps, the paramount one is acknowledging the bloody truth behind our rechargeable batteries.
Thank you for reading all the way till here. Hope this convinces you to read the actual book too.
Update - 8 March 2025
Is this even possible, given the facts?
This book was gifted to me by my classmates (EEE'21) for my birthday under our birthday fund initiative from 2023-24. I requested for Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and I am ever so grateful to my friends for obliging me. This book is close to my heart in ways more than one.
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