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

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If you are listening to it on audio Peter Ganim reads Siddharth's words in a measured and immensely listenable tone. The region is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium. He was one of only 10 academics globally to receive the prestigious BA Global Professorship in 2020. Kolwezi is tucked in the hazy hills of the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. The idea that my phone has caused the death of a child in Congo is not only abhorrent, but devastating to me.While Tesla’s responsible sourcing practices apply to all materials and supply chain partners, we recognize the conditions associated with select artisanal mining (ASM) of cobalt in the DRC. In 2021, a total of 111,750 tons of cobalt representing 72 percent of the global supply was mined in the DRC, a contribution that is expected to increase as demand from consumer-facing technology companies and electric vehicle manufacturers grows each year.

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. Cobalt Red' is the searing, first-ever expose of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves.After all, who is going to go all the way to the Congo and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them? Rather, they have often served as a slave labor force for the extraction of those resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated. Few people sitting for breakfast in England in the 1700s knew that their tea was sweetened by sugar harvested under brutal conditions by African slaves toiling in the West Indies.

I also must thank all in Congo that were involved in the making of this book; may it bring your truth to the world and may we all be strong enough to make the change that needs to be made - your stories have forever changed me and I will never, ever, forget you. Kara's next book is also on this topic, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our lives (St Martin's Press, Jan 2023).

Whats going on in the Congo is abhorrent conditions, child labor, under reporting of deaths from mining facilities and companies lying about where their cobalt comes from. It is a vast, intricate and willfully ignorant system to perpetuate the continued exploitation of the people of Congo. The most advanced consumer electronic devices and electric vehicles in the world rely on a substance that is excavated by the blistered hands of peasants using picks, shovels, and rebar. Drawing on multiple field missions and first-hand accounts of the process of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Siddharth Kara shows in vivid detail not only life on the ground and the true human cost of extraction, but also the gross inequalities built into global value chains and business models that underpin this industry. The severity of harm being caused by cobalt mining is sadly not a new experience for the people of the Congo.

Over the course of several years, he visits dozens of mines and learns and investigates every inch of the supply chain. They're both gruesome, one involves bullets and the other involves gashes from falls, tunnel collapses and many more scenarios of horrific accidents.The people and children of Congo are very, very, brave [ they do what they have to do to have lives, even though it is full of pain and poverty and more often than not, death]. In COBALT RED, Siddharth Kara provides an intense account of cobalt mining in the Congo, where three-fourths of the world’s cobalt is hand-mined in dangerous and toxic conditions by thousands of men, women, and children for one or two dollars a day. It is a failure of everyone involved including consumers who maybe powerless to stop these things but no doubt we're involved for not putting pressure on companies to push for better working conditions for these people. To uncover the realities of cobalt mining in the Congo, I journeyed into the heart of the country’s two mining provinces—Haut-Katanga and Lualaba.