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Cobalt Red

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The Katanga region in the southeastern corner of the Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.

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The scramble for cobalt is reminiscent of King Leopold II’s infamous plunder of the Congo’s ivory and rubber during his brutal reign as king sovereign of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.

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The harsh realities of cobalt mining in the Congo are an inconvenience to every stakeholder in the chain. No company wants to concede that the rechargeable batteries used to power smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles contain cobalt mined by peasants and children in hazardous conditions.

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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. To assure the cobalt in Tesla’s supply chain is ethically sourced, we have implemented targeted due diligence procedures for cobalt sourcing.

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The two leading coalitions are the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) and the Global Battery Alliance (GBA).

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In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.

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Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

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Although today’s trillion-dollar global mining industry is dominated by coal, iron, bauxite, phosphate, gypsum, and copper, the so-called strategic and rare earth elements used in modern technology devices and renewable forms of energy are rapidly growing in economic and geopolitical importance. Many of these strategic minerals can be found in central Africa, chief among them cobalt.

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Today, these laborers 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).

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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.

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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.

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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. Labor is valued by the penny, life hardly at all.

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Centuries of European slave trading beginning in the early 1500s caused irreparable injury to the native population, culminating in colonization by King Leopold II, who set the table for the exploitation that continues to this day. The descriptions of Leopold’s regime remain disturbingly applicable to the modern Congo.

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Joseph Conrad immortalized the evil of Leopold’s Congo Free State in Heart of Darkness (1899) with four words—“The horror! The horror!”

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Spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of Leopold or a tech company.

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in 1960—when the direction of the nation could have drastically shifted. The country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, offered the nation a glimpse of a future in which the Congolese people could determine their own fates, use the nation’s resources for the benefit of the masses, and reject the interference of foreign powers that sought to continue exploiting the country’s resources. It was a bold, anti-colonial vision that could have altered the course of history in the Congo and across Africa. In short order, Belgium, the United Nations, the United States, and the neocolonial interests they represented rejected Lumumba’s vision, conspired to assassinate him, and propped up a violent dictator, Joseph Mobutu, in his place.

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Most people do not know what is happening in the cobalt mines of the Congo, because the realities are hidden behind numerous layers of multinational supply chains that serve to erode accountability. By the time one traces the chain from the child slogging in the cobalt mine to the rechargeable gadgets and cars sold to consumers around the world,…

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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. The slaves remained far removed from the British breakfast table until a band of abolitionists placed the true picture of slavery directly in front of the English people. Stakeholders fought to maintain the system. They told the British public not to trust what they were told. They espoused the great humanity of the slave trade—Africans were not suffering, they were being “saved” from the savagery of the dark continent. They argued that Africans worked in pleasing conditions on the islands. When those arguments failed, the slavers claimed they made changes…

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The truth, however, was this—but for the demand for sugar and the immense profits accrued through the sale of it, the entire…

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Today’s tech barons will tell you a similar tale about cobalt. They will tell you that they uphold international human rights norms and that their particular supply chains are clean. They will assure you that conditions are not as bad as they seem and that they are bringing commerce, wages, education, and development to the poorest people of Africa (“saving” them). They will also assure you that they have implemented changes to remedy the problems on the ground, at least at the mines from which they say they buy…

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The truth, however, is this—but for their demand for cobalt and the immense profits they accrue through the sale of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles, the entire blood-for-cobalt economy would not exist. Furthermore, the inevitable outcome of a lawless scramble for cobalt in an impoverished and war-torn country can…

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“Unspeakable Richness”

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It is in every aspect an enormous and atrocious lie in action. If it were not rather appalling the cool completeness would be amusing. —Joseph Conrad, letter to Roger Casement, December 17, 1903

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Imagine for a moment if almost three-fourths of all fossil fuel beneath the earth’s surface was instead extracted from a single patch of earth roughly four hundred by one hundred kilometers in size. Imagine that within this patch of earth, approximately half the oil was located in and around a single city and that the deposits were shallow enough for anyone to access with a shovel. This would surely be the most indispensable city in the world. Massive drilling companies would flock to it to stake their claims on the riches. So too would the local population from miles around. Violence would erupt to secure control of valuable territory. Preservation of the environment would become an afterthought. Regional governance would be marred by corruption. Profits would be asymmetrically distributed, with powerful stakeholders at the top of the chain accruing the most benefit while the local inhabitants languished.

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The batteries in almost every smartphone, tablet, laptop, and electric vehicle made today cannot recharge without Kolwezi.

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There is no known deposit of cobalt-containing ore anywhere in the world that is larger, more accessible, and higher grade than the cobalt under Kolwezi.

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a four-hundred-kilometer crescent from Kolwezi to northern Zambia, forming an area called the Central African Copper Belt. The Copper Belt is a metallogenic wonder that contains vast mineral riches, including 10 percent of the world’s copper and about half the world’s cobalt reserves. In 2021, a total of 111,750 tons of cobalt representing 72 percent of the global supply was mined in the DRC,

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Kolwezi is the new heart of darkness, a tormented heir to those Congolese atrocities that came before—colonization, wars, and generations of slavery.

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The first European to cross the heart of the African continent in a single trip from east to west, British lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron, ominously wrote this about the Congo in The Times on January 7, 1876: The interior is mostly a magnificent and healthy country of unspeakable richness. I have a small specimen of good coal; other minerals such as gold, copper, iron and silver are abundant, and I am confident that with a wise and liberal (not lavish) expenditure of capital, one of the greatest systems of inland navigation in the world might be utilized, and from 30 months to 36 months begin to repay any enterprising capitalist that might take the matter in hand.2

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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.

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The battery packs in electric vehicles require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than one thousand times the amount required for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050,3 and there is no known place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC.

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Cobalt mining in towns like Kolwezi takes place at the bottom of complex supply chains that unfurl like a kraken into some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world. Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Dell, LTC, Huawei, Tesla, Ford, General Motors, BMW, and Daimler-Chrysler are just some of the companies that buy some, most, or all their cobalt from the DRC, by way of battery manufacturers and cobalt refiners based in China, Japan, South Korea, Finland, and Belgium.

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The flow of minerals and money is further obscured by a web of shady connections between foreign mining companies and Congolese political leaders, some of whom have become scandalously rich auctioning the country’s mining concessions while tens of millions of Congolese people suffer extreme poverty, food insecurity, and civil strife.

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There was not a single peaceful transfer of power in the Congo from 1960, when Patrice Lumumba was elected to be the nation’s first prime minister, until 2019, when Félix Tshisekedi was elected.

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As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.

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THE HEART OF AFRICA

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The source of the Congo River was the final great mystery of African geography, and the drive by European explorers to solve this mystery tragically altered the fate of the Congo and made possible all the suffering taking place in the mining provinces today.

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Prior to Congolese independence, the Belgians established extensive mining operations in Katanga, and they also made every effort to keep control of the region after independence by orchestrating the secession of the province followed by the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba.

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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.

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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.

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FROM TOXIC PIT TO SHINY SHOWROOM

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This merging of informal with formal, artisanal with industrial, is the most important aspect of the cobalt supply chain to understand. It is, despite claims to the contrary, all but impossible to isolate artisanal cobalt from industrial production.

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Artisanal miners occupy the base of the chain. Known locally as creuseurs (“diggers”), they use rudimentary tools to dig in pits, trenches, and tunnels to find an ore called heterogenite, which contains copper, nickel, cobalt, and sometimes uranium.

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Artisanal cobalt feeds into the formal supply chain via an informal ecosystem of négociants (traders) and comptoirs (depots), also known as maisons d’achat (buying houses).

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Négociants are independent operators who work in and around artisanal sites to purchase cobalt from artisanal miners. They are almost all young Congolese males, and they either pay a fixed price per sack or offer a split of the sales price to the depots.

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There is no scrutiny at any depots as to the source or conditions under which the ore being purchased was mined.

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From this point forward, it is impossible to isolate artisanal from industrial production.

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Although Congolese law stipulates that mineral depots should be registered and operated only by Congolese nationals, almost all depots in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces are operated by Chinese buyers.

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Artisanal production accounts for up to 30 percent of all cobalt mined in the DRC, although the number could be even higher, as there is no accurate way to disaggregate artisanal from industrial production.

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Prior to export from the DRC, cobalt-containing ores must undergo a preliminary processing stage during which the cobalt is separated from other metals in the ore.

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These semi-refined forms of cobalt are loaded onto trucks and driven to seaports in Dar es Salaam and Durban for export to commercial-grade refiners, most of which are in China.

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Although it would seem advantageous for the DRC to refine cobalt to commercial-grade form and control more of the value chain, a senior official at Gécamines explained, “In Congo, we do not have sufficient electricity capacity to refine cobalt.”

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Fully refined cobalt is combined with other metals to make cathodes—the positively charged part of a battery.

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Most of the cobalt in these batteries originated in the Congo.

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COBALT AND THE COPPER BELT

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Cobalt is used in the manufacture of superalloys for turbines and jet engines; as a catalyst for cleaner fuels; in carbides used to make cutting tools; in materials used for dental and bone surgeries; in chemotherapies; and in the cathodes of rechargeable batteries.

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By virtue of geographic fluke, the Central African Copper Belt holds roughly half of the world’s cobalt reserves at an estimated 3.5 million tons.

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the reason the copper-cobalt deposits in the Copper Belt are so shallow is because they are uniquely found in “sediment hosted stratiform deposits.”

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Such deposits are the only ones with the potential to be pushed upward to the surface by tectonic activity, thereby making them accessible to artisanal miners.

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The Central African Copper Belt happens to be located on the western shoulder of one of the most spectacular examples in the world of this tectonic activity—the East African Rift.

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As a result of the ocean water deposits and subsequent tectonic action, copper-cobalt ores across the Copper Belt are found both at great depths and near the surface.

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According to Hitzman, “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.”

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Artisanal miners dig tunnels up to sixty meters deep to find these “raisins” of heterogenite. One of the largest known deposits of cobalt raisins is beneath a neighborhood of Kolwezi called Kasulo, a madhouse of tunnel digging that is unlike any place on earth.

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DARK SIDE OF THE EV REVOLUTION

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The first rechargeable electric vehicle was invented in 1880s, but it was not until the early 1900s that electric vehicles were being produced on a commercial scale. By 1910, around 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were propelled by electric engines. Had the trend continued, we would all be living on a cleaner, cooler planet. Instead, internal combustion engines came to dominate the next century of the automobile industry.

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Driving across the nation required greater ranges than could be achieved by EV technology at the time. In addition, the discovery of large oil reserves in Texas, California, and Oklahoma made internal combustion–powered cars much cheaper to operate.

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Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement would require at least 100 million total electric vehicles in use by 2030. An even more ambitious EV30@30 Campaign was launched in 2017 with the goal of accelerating the deployment of electric vehicles, targeting a 30 percent market share for electric vehicles sales by 2030. The EV30@30 target would require a global stock of 230 million EVs by 2030, a fourteen-fold increase over 2021 numbers.8 EV sales could end up being even greater, as twenty-four nations pledged at COP26 to eliminate the sale of gas-powered vehicles entirely by 2040.

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WHY DO LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES NEED COBALT?

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To achieve mass adoption of electric vehicles at the levels projected will require that EV batteries become cheaper and are able to achieve longer ranges between charges.

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Production costs are projected to reach the all-important mark of $100/kWh by 2024, at which point EVs will achieve cost parity with gas-powered cars.9

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To increase range, batteries require higher energy densities, and only lithium-ion chemistries using cobalt cathodes are currently able to deliver maximum energy density while maintaining thermal stability.

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As a battery generates electrical power, the chemicals inside it are gradually “used up.” A rechargeable battery, on the other hand, is one that allows a change in the direction of flow of electrons and ions using another power source that pushes everything back to the starting point.

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Lithium-based chemistries became the dominant form for rechargeable batteries because lithium is the lightest metal in the world, which has obvious benefits for consumer technology and electric vehicle applications.

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Cobalt is used in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries because it possesses a unique electron configuration that allows the battery to remain stable at higher energy densities throughout repeated charge-discharge cycles. Higher energy density means the battery can hold more charge, which is critical to maximize the driving range of an electric vehicle between charges.

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Lithium accounts for only 7 percent of the materials used in each type of battery, whereas cobalt can be as high as 60 percent.10

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Since 2015, the trend with these batteries has been to reduce cobalt reliance by moving toward higher ratios of nickel.11 Nickel has lower thermal stability than cobalt, so the higher the ratio of nickel used, the lower the battery’s stability and safety.

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At present, most cobalt-free alternatives have significant disadvantages relating to energy density, thermal stability, manufacturing costs, and longevity. Many of them are also a decade or more away from commercial-scale production.

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There will surely be another prize slumbering in the dirt that will be made valuable by the global economy. Such has been the curse of the Congo for generations. Unspeakable riches have brought the people of the Congo little other than unspeakable pain.

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Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected—the cost of labor has been nullified through the degradation of Africans at the bottom of an economic chain that purports to exonerate all participants of accountability through a shrewd scheme of obfuscation adorned with hypocritical proclamations about the preservation of human rights. It is a system of absolute exploitation for absolute profit.

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“Here It Is Better Not to Be Born”

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Of all the shameful and infamous expedients whereby man has preyed upon man … this vile thing dares to call itself commerce. —Roger Casement, letter to the Foreign Office, September 6, 1903

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The original settlement contained white-owned businesses surrounded by tree-lined streets where the Europeans lived. Mine-worker compounds for African laborers were erected in patchwork plots near Étoile and Ruashi. Both mines still operate today, and for many people in nearby communities, the working and living conditions have changed very little since the Belgians first arrived.

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Katangan copper first made its way to Europe via Portuguese slave traders as early as the sixteenth century. In 1859, the Scottish explorer David Livingstone arrived on a trek from South Africa into Katanga and noted large pieces of copper “in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross” that were used as a form of payment.

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In the summer of 1867, Livingstone returned to Katanga in search of the source of the Nile River.

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The malachite from which the copper is extracted is found in large quantities on the tops of certain bare, rugged hills. In their search for it, the natives dig

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little round shafts seldom deeper than 15 or 20 feet. They have no lateral workings, but when one shaft becomes too deep for them, they leave it and open another.2

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Stairs sent his two most trusted men to reason with Msiri, but after three days of failed negotiations, the Europeans shot Msiri, decapitated him, and stuck his head on a pole for all to see the consequences of standing against Leopold and his Congo Free State.3 Blood had been spilled for control of Katanga’s riches. There was no turning back.

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It will be utterly impossible to exhaust your bodies of oxidized ores during this century … The quantity of copper you can thus produce is entirely a question of demand—the mines can supply any amount. You can make more copper and make it much cheaper than any mines now working. I believe your mines will be the source of the world’s future supply of copper.4

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Almost all that copper had cobalt attached to it, although it would take another 110 years before the rechargeable battery revolution would make the cobalt ten times more valuable than the copper.

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Katanga’s native population proved insufficient to meet the labor requirements of UMHK’s fast-growing mining operations, so the company recruited thousands of workers and purchased slaves to work in the mines.

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Profits soared, especially after the start of World War I, during which time millions of bullets fired

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During World War II, Katanga again proved indispensable to the Allied war effort, providing gold, tin, tungsten, cobalt, and more than eight hundred thousand tons of copper for the manufacture of ordnance.

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Tens of thousands of Congolese people were worked to the bone in copper mines and sent to the war to die for the benefit of Belgium and its European allies.

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Buildings, homes, roads, people, and animals are draped in dirt. Land and sky blend together into a vague coppery palette. Trees are reduced to brittle sticks. Small lakes and tributaries are transformed into fields of rust.

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CHEMAF is also one of the major players in the DRC’s artisanal mining sector. The company operates a “model mine” for artisanal miners in Kolwezi in conjunction with a U.S.-based NGO, Pact. At least it did, until it became clear that all was not what it seemed.

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As the living conditions of displaced people worsen, their desperation increases, and that desperation is precisely what drives thousands of local inhabitants to scrounge for cobalt in hazardous conditions on the land they once occupied.

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“In Congo, the government is weak. Our state institutions are impotent. They are kept this way so they can be manipulated by the president to suit his ambitions,” Reine said.

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“Kabila allows the foreigners to steal the country’s resources, and the artisanal miners suffer because of this. He takes bribes and closes his eyes while the creuseurs are made like animals,” Joseph explained.

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Gloria reinforced Reine’s concerns over environmental damage caused by mining companies. She then laid out an even greater concern: Let me tell you the most important thing that no one is discussing. The mineral reserves in Congo will last another forty years, maybe fifty? During that time, the population of Congo will double. If our resources are sold to foreigners for the benefit of the political elite, instead of investing in education and development for our people, in two generations, we will have two hundred million people who are poor, uneducated, and have nothing left of value. This is what is happening, and if it does not stop, it will be a disaster.

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A power struggle has since ensued between Tshisekedi and Kabila. Tshisekedi is perceived as trying to align the country closer to the U.S., whereas Kabila is fighting to maintain links to China.

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Let’s say in eighty-five percent of the major mining contracts you will always find a Chinese company behind the deal. Most of these deals lacked transparency. Their modus operandi was to ensure that nothing would be published in terms of these contracts. There were a lot of bribes going around in the last regime to make this happen.

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KIPUSHI

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Like most cities in the Copper Belt, Kipushi was founded as a mining town. It is home to the immense Kipushi Mine, which was originally called the Prince Leopold Mine when the Belgians established it in 1924.

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The road from Lubumbashi to Kipushi is the primary route of export for cobalt and other minerals from the DRC.

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The foundation for China’s dominance in Africa was established in 2000 when President Jiang Zemin proposed the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to facilitate Chinese investments in African countries. The relationship was billed as a win-win: the Chinese would build much-needed roads, dams, airports, bridges, mobile networks, and power plants across Africa, and in exchange, China would secure access to vital resources to support its growing economy.

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terms, SICOMINES agreed to pave 6,600 kilometers of road and to build two hospitals and two universities in Katanga, in exchange for mining rights to two concessions near Kolwezi: Dikuluwe and Mashamba West.

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Kabila established a private firm called Strategic Projects and Investments (SPI), which received money from a range of Chinese projects, including the tolls paid by trucks that crossed the border at Kipushi after the new road was built. An investigation by Bloomberg revealed that SPI collected tolls of $302 million between 2010 and 2020, and that this was just one of the many Chinese deals through which Kabila and his family profited.8

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“The termites are drawn to copper in the dirt. They build the hills at that location. Creuseurs sometimes dig under them because they know there will be copper and cobalt

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The name Mai-Mai means “water-water,” based on the belief that they have magical powers that can turn enemy bullets into water. The militias originally took up arms to support Joseph Mobutu against Laurent Kabila’s invasion in 1997. Soon after, the Mai-Mai degenerated into roving bands of hoodlums fighting for territory, and they turned to mining to fund their efforts.

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More than three thousand women, children, and men shoveled, scraped, and scrounged across the artisanal mining zone under a ferocious sun and a haze of dust. With each hack at the earth, a puff of dirt floated up like a specter into the lungs of the diggers.

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Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe, but that is not the biggest worry that the artisanal miners have. The ore often contains traces of radioactive uranium.

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Each day, they filled large raffia sacks with mud, dirt, and heterogenite stones that they dug out of the pit. They broke down larger stones into pebbles using a metal mallet so that they could fit more into each sack. Once the sacks were full, they carried them to nearby pools of water to sift the contents through a kaningio (metal sieve). The sieved heterogenite stones were then loaded back into the sacks. It took several such cycles each day to obtain enough heterogenite pebbles to fill one large raffia sack.

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“There are three different permits required for transporting ore. The price depends on how much ore is being transported and the distance it is transported. Négociants must pay something like eighty or one hundred dollars per year to transport one ton of ore no more than ten kilometers. A comptoir will have to transport many tons of ore, and maybe the distances could be up to fifty kilometers. The mining companies must transport thousands of tons, and it could be more than three hundred kilometers if they are traveling from Kolwezi to Kipushi, so the fee in this case can be thousands of dollars each year.”

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Being cut off from the marketplace forced them to accept submarket prices from négociants for their hard labor, further reinforcing the state of poverty that pushed them into artisanal mining to begin with.

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From pit, to pool, to sack of stones—the family had subdivided the steps involved in getting cobalt out of the ground and packed for transport by négociants. The négociants then sold the cobalt into the formal supply chain via nondescript depots along the highway. Laundering minerals from child to battery was just that simple.

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The women and girls who suffered these attacks represented the invisible, brutalized backbone of the global cobalt supply chain. No one at the top of the chain even bothered making press statements about zero-tolerance policies on sexual assault against the women and girls who scrounged for their cobalt.

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I was expecting to see a team of formal mineral traders, perhaps with government uniforms or badges, but instead, the négociants were young men dressed in jeans and casual shirts. Unlike the dirt-crusted artisanal miners, their clothes were clean and bright.

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The négociants took a cursory look inside the sacks and offered a fixed price that the artisanal miners had to accept. Philippe told me that women were always paid less than men for the same sack of cobalt.

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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.

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The depots were the unremarkable yet vital junctions between the informal and formal cobalt supply chains.

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I visited nine depots in a six-kilometer stretch northeast of Kipushi, and all but two were operated by Chinese agents. None of the Chinese agents were willing to speak with me. The other two depots were run by Indians—Hardeep and Amit—both from the state of Punjab.

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The prices paid at Depot Tiger and Depot 233 for a kilogram of heterogenite with 1 percent grade was 200 Congolese francs (about $0.11). A forty-kilogram sack, therefore, sold for about $4.40. The négociants at Kipushi paid Faustin about $2.80 per sack. Authorization to transport ore and a means of conveyance meant that the négociants operating in Kipushi were able to retain almost 40 percent of the value of each sack of heterogenite. It seemed a needless layer in the supply chain that shifted value away from the people who worked the hardest. For that matter, the depots equally seemed to be a needless layer in the supply chain, siphoning yet more value out of the system by providing an informal and untraceable entry point for artisanal cobalt into the formal supply chain. 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.

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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.

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high rate of birth defects in mining communities, such as holoprosencephaly, agnathia otocephaly, stillbirth, miscarriages, and low birth weight.10

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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.

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“Before getting a concession, the mining companies must submit a plan on waste management to the government. Of course, they do not adhere to their plans. But the government is not sending people to monitor their activities either.”

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government officials predictably wanted to maximize mining royalties, which meant maximizing the extraction of ore, which meant letting mining companies do as they pleased so long as the royalties were paid.

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In addition to focusing on child labor, IDAK’s CSR plan described programs for strengthening local communities, building and staffing schools, promoting alternate livelihoods, and improving public health capacity and infrastructure. It all sounded very promising, but I could not help but wonder why so little of it seemed to be happening.

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Foreign mining companies would argue that they do not employ artisanal miners, so the responsibility is not theirs, even though the cobalt from artisanal digging ends up in their supply chains, and even though in some cases they allow artisanal miners to work on their concessions to boost production.

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The government of the DRC would argue that they do not have the money to support good wages or other income schemes, even though mining concessions are sold for billions of dollars and royalties and taxes in the billions are collected each year based in no small part on the value of the minerals excavated by artisanal miners.

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Cobalt refiners, battery manufacturers, and tech and EV companies would argue that the responsibility should be borne downstream, even though the scramble for cobalt only exists because of their demand for it.

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no one up the chain considers themselves responsible for the artisanal miners, even though they all profit from them.

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Philippe offered a theory, “IDAK has the correct goals, but there is no chance to realize their goals so long as the government is corrupt and the Chinese rule Katanga. The Chinese pay billions to the government, and the politicians close their eyes. Organizations like IDAK and other civil society organizations are allowed to exist only to show they exist.”

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If you really want to understand what is happening in the Congo’s mining sector, you must first understand our history. After independence, the mines were managed by the Belgians. They took all the money, and there was no benefit for the people. After the Belgians, we had “Africanization” with Mobutu. He nationalized the mines, but again, they only benefited the government, not the people. With [Joseph] Kabila, we created the Mining Code in 2002, and this brought foreign investment into the mining sector. They said the Mining Code would improve the lives of the Congolese people, but today, their lives are much worse. Now you can see—never have the people of Congo benefited from the mines of Congo. We only become poorer.

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“There is an agenda to promote a false picture of the conditions here. The mining companies claim there are not any problems here. They say they maintain international standards. Everyone believes them, so nothing changes.”

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They tell the international community about their programs in Congo and how the cobalt is clean, and this allows their constituents to say everything is okay. Actually, this makes the situation worse because the companies will say—“GBA assures us the situation is good. RMI says the cobalt is clean.” Because of this, no one tries to improve the conditions.

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When I pressed Mr. Stanislaus on what I had seen on the ground, he acknowledged that there were some problems, at least as relates to child labor. “According to the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], up to seventy percent of the cobalt from the DR Congo has some touch with child labor. There are large gaps of information on the supply chain, so we have to fix the information flow in a trusted way,” he said.

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If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector. How much of the Congo’s cobalt was “touched” by the hundreds of thousands of Congolese people suffering the consequences of toxic exposure to cobalt, uranium, lead, nickel, mercury, and other heavy metals? How much was touched by the infants who inhaled hazardous mining dust every day at artisanal mines? What about the noxious gas clouds and toxic dumping that contaminated the air, land, crops, animals, and fish stocks of the Copper Belt, and what about the millions of trees chopped down to make way for enormous open-pit mines? Let us not forget the unknown number of people who were injured or worse in mining accidents.

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The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay … He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. —Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

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NOTHING LOOKS THE SAME after a trip to the Congo. The world back home no longer makes sense. It is difficult to reconcile how it even inhabits the same planet. Neatly arranged mountains of vegetables at grocery stores seem vulgar. Bright lights and flushing toilets seem like sorcery. Clean air and water feel like a crime. The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent. Most of it was built, after all, on violence, neatly tucked away in history books that tend to sanitize the truth.

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We are rarely asked, if ever, to confront the untold suffering that has been endured by Africa. Imagine for a moment what it was like for an African person to be ripped from her home; separated from husband and children; chained, branded, beaten, raped, and incarcerated—all before being forced into the putrid cargo hold of a slave ship, crammed next to hundreds of agonized men, women, children, and babies. Or what it was like to spend six weeks in this cargo hold without room to sit upright, locked down by flesh-ripping shackles day and night. Or to have to use a bucket for a toilet in front of hundreds of people as the ship crashed through waves. Or to try to comfort an inconsolable child who was frightened, feverish, and seasick. Or to be one of the gravely ill, but still living, who was thrown into the ocean like so much refuse. Or to survive this hell only to arrive in the Americas and be sold into slavery, where the real torture began.

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Imagine for a moment the toll taken on a person, a family, a people, a continent across centuries of the slave trade, followed by a century of colonization. Empires were built and generations of wealth were amassed across the Western world in this manner. Perhaps that is the most enduring contrast of all between our world and theirs—our generally safe and satisfied nations can scarcely function without forcing great violence upon the people of Africa. The catastrophe in the mining provinces of the Congo is the latest chapter in this unholy tale.

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Indians have a long history on the continent dating back to the 1840s, when the British began shipping them to Africa to work as debt bondage slaves on railroads and plantations. The debts were manufactured through the imposition of exorbitant land taxes. If a peasant could not afford the taxes, he was told he could work it off by laying railroad in East Africa. Illiterate peasants were made to sign contracts they could not read, agreeing to discharge their debts as indentured workers.

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In Africa, a hierarchy was soon established—Africans at the bottom, Indians and Arabs above them, and Europeans at the top. Skin tone dictated the hierarchy back then, and it still does today—simply swap out the Europeans with the Chinese.

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Spires of silver smoke rise from deep within the forest where men burn trees to make charcoal, their only source of heat and light. This land that is home to the world’s largest reserves of an element crucial to the manufacture of the most dominant form of rechargeable energy in the world still awaits the arrival of electricity.

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Copper first lured the Belgians to the hills near Likasi in the early 1900s.

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They also discovered uranium on April 11, 1915. The deposits had an average concentration of 65 percent U308 (triuranium octoxide), making it the highest-grade source of uranium in the world at the time.

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the Manhattan Project identified Shinkolobwe as the ideal source for the high-grade uranium required to build an atomic bomb. On September 18, 1942, at an office in Midtown Manhattan, the owners of UMHK agreed to sell uranium from Shinkolobwe to the U.S. Army for around one dollar per pound. Shinkolobwe provided roughly 75 percent of the uranium that was used for the bombs dropped from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.1

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Although Shinkolobwe has been nonoperational for decades, rumors persist that rogue army officials and organized criminals excavate uranium and sell it on the black market to the likes of Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan.

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Many of the artisanal sites are guarded by informal militia units, some of which are paid by mining companies. The units typically consist of a “general,” who leads a force of ten to twenty young men armed with Kalashnikovs, handguns, and machetes.

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The inhabitants of other villages in the area lived under the constant threat of also having to leave their homes one day. Their only prayer was that there should be nothing valuable in the dirt under the next village.

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“The mining companies can say they do not buy cobalt from these villages. But where do they think the cobalt goes? If no one is buying it, why are they digging it?”

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The boys expelled metallic coughs as they spoke. They complained of itching and burning skin on their legs, as well as chronic pain in their backs and necks. They had been breaking and washing stones in the village for as long as they could remember and had never attended a day of school. They said they awoke each morning anxious to return to the stream.

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Solange said that everything changed in 2012. “[Joseph] Kabila sold the mines to the Chinese. They made it seem like a blessing. They said we should dig cobalt and get rich. Everyone started to dig, but no one became rich. We do not earn enough to meet our needs.”

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Kiyonge showed us the hut in which he and his three brothers lived. It was a thatched structure with a plastic sheet tied on top as a makeshift roof. Shorts and shirts were hanging to dry on a string. Inside, the hut was roughly three meters by three meters with a hard dirt floor. One white plastic bowl sat in a corner, and there was one large metal pot surrounded by large stones for cooking and heating. There were also some knives, spoons, plastic containers, and a hodgepodge of clothes. The boys boiled manioc and onions that grew in a field next to the village to make rudimentary fufu, a staple dish of the poor in the DRC. They slept on mats on the ground. During the rainy season, they draped the hut in as many spare pieces of plastic tarp and ripped up raffia sacks as they could find. Water from the storms inevitably seeped through and muddied the ground on which they slept.

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Based on my observations that day, it seemed that deep within an otherwise unremarkable hill, far removed from any signs of civilization, there was something akin to an ant colony of humans who tunneled, excavated, washed, packed, and fed valuable cobalt up the chain to the companies that produced the world’s rechargeable devices and cars. I never in all my trips to the Congo saw or heard of any of these companies or their downstream suppliers monitoring this part of the supply chain, or any of the countless places like it.

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A few of the larger villages around Likasi had schools, but most of them did not, especially in remoter areas.

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Josephine said that most families in poor villages around Likasi were not able to pay the school fees on a consistent basis and that as a consequence, parents often sent their children to work instead. Digging for cobalt was the surest way to walk home each day with at least some money.

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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?

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Morel reasoned that “the statistics afforded, therefore, conclusive proof in themselves that the natives of the Congo were being systematically robbed … By what processes, then, were the natives of the Congo being induced to labour since commerce apparently played no part in the affair?” Morel recalled the reports of atrocities submitted by missionaries and concluded that the Congo Free State was operating by virtue of “the reduction of millions of men to a condition of absolute slavery, by a system of legalized robbery enforced by violence.”2

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Someone was skimming tens of millions of francs in profit from this system of “absolute slavery,” and it could only be one person—King Leopold II.

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Morel and Casement met in England and formed the Congo Reform Association (CRA) in March 1904 to bring down Leopold’s colonial regime. The CRA became the first international human rights organization of the twentieth century, driven by the power of data (Morel) and survivor testimonies (Casement). Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington were among the many supporters of the CRA. By 1908, Leopold was forced to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, bringing an end to one of the most brazen systems of slavery in the history of Africa. Or so it seemed.

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Almost every industrial copper-cobalt mine I visited was resuscitated through crooked dealings that siphoned value away from the local population into the hands of kleptocrats and foreign stakeholders. Leopold’s model remained intact.

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Most of the major mining concessions located between Likasi and Kolwezi would prove to have artisanal miners working on them. In some cases, artisanal miners were responsible for all the production taking place.

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Gécamines provided jobs with fixed wages to tens of thousands of citizens in the mining provinces. The company built schools and hospitals, provided insurance schemes, and cultivated pride in its employees. It also trained hundreds of mining engineers who had prestigious jobs with competitive salaries. Some even went on to work for major mining companies abroad. Unfortunately, the entire system was erected on a shaky foundation. The company fell into ruin in large part due to the apparent theft of funds by executive management, mining officials, and elite government figures, chief among them Joseph Mobutu. In the waning days of his reign, Mobutu is said to have pilfered massive sums of money from the company’s coffers.

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As to the question of where the cobalt went from the depots, I can only say that of the thirty-plus depots I saw in or around Likasi and Kambove, almost all of them were operated by Chinese buyers.

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We arrived at length at a group of boys, ages twelve to seventeen. The eldest, Peter, wore blue jeans, plastic slippers, and a red shirt with the letters AIG stitched on the front. Imagine that on a remote hill deep in the Congo’s mining provinces, a child can be found digging for cobalt, wearing a muddy shirt with the logo of the behemoth American financial services company that had to be bailed out for $180 billion during the 2008 financial crisis. Imagine what even 1 percent of that money could do in a place like this, if it were spent on the people who needed it, not stolen by those who exploited them.

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Why are the Congolese people still using their Zaire national ID cards from 1997? Because new national ID cards require that the government conduct a new national census, and the last one was conducted in 1984.

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One senior parliamentarian in Kinshasa once told me that the international community was mistaken about the issue of child labor at artisanal mines in the Congo. According to him, they were actually Pygmies.

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a secret world of artisanal mining hidden in these hills that operated in an even more oppressive manner than the more visible sites like Kipushi and Tocotens. Thousands of tons of cobalt were being fed from this shadow economy into the formal supply chain by a ragged population in conditions that at times were next of kin to slavery.

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I asked Arthur if he thought the army had forcibly relocated the villagers to the settlement to dig for cobalt. “No one wants to live out there! But there is cobalt and gold, so the army takes the poorest people and makes them dig.”

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The great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about; that Europe began to “propagate” at a time when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry; that it was our misfortune to encounter that particular Europe on our path, and that Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history. —Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

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OF ALL THE HAZARDS one encounters in the Congo, perhaps the most dangerous one is history. It is a force as unrelenting as the great river that bends the land to its will, and like the river, it clouds everything in its path.

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There is no single starting point, least of all in a land with such an epic and tragic past as the Congo, but if we were to try to identify a place and time that we might call the beginning of this journey, we might settle on the mouth of the Congo River in the year 1482. Everything that is happening in Katanga in the twenty-first century is the result of an unrelenting sequence of events that began at that place and time. The trajectory, however, was not irreversible. There was a fleeting moment of hope at the dawn of independence in 1960 when the fate of the Congo could have been so different … but hope was destroyed before it ever had a chance. History made sure of it. More than any king, slave trader, warlord, or kleptocrat, history reigns supreme in the Congo, darkening the land like a gathering storm, the moment before the first bolt rips the sky.1

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Lubumbashi and Kipushi

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The Hills Have Secrets Likasi and Kambove

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Colony to the World

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INVASION AND THE SLAVE TRADE: 1482–1884

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When Diego Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, he became the first European to meet the people of the Kongo Kingdom. At one point, he asked the name of the mighty river that turned the ocean brown with sediment more than a hundred kilometers from the coast. The Kongo people replied with nzere (“the river that swallows all others,”), but Cão’s cartographer misheard and recorded the river’s name as “Zaire.”

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From the early 1500s until the end of the slave trade in 1866, one-fourth of the 12.5 million slaves stolen from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic would depart from Loango Bay.

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The one person most responsible for opening pathways into the interior of Africa was David Livingstone. Born in Scotland in 1813, Livingstone traveled to Cape Town in 1841 to preach Christianity to the natives.

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Although quinine was not a cure for malaria, it helped prevent a death sentence. Quinine proved to be the first of two crucial developments that facilitated European colonization of Africa. The second development involved boiling water. Beginning in the 1850s, the steam engine revolutionized transport. Steamboats carried goods quickly and less expensively across rough seas. They could also forge upstream to allow exploration of rivers into the African continent.

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it had been several years since anyone had heard from Livingstone, and there was great interest in determining whether he was still alive. Efforts to discover Livingstone’s fate by a Welsh orphan turned American journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, sealed the Congo’s fate.

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Stanley felt inspired to finish Livingstone’s work by discovering the source of the Nile.

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Stanley demonstrated that the Congo River was navigable in three sections from the coast deep into the African interior. Livingstone’s dream was achieved, but it became a nightmare for the people of the Congo.

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Stanley’s journey opened the Congo to the eyes of Europe, and King Leopold II of Belgium made his move.

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George Washington Williams, an African American minister traveling in the Congo, uncovered Stanley’s ruse as a way of intimidating tribal leaders into signing his treaties. He wrote about it in An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II: A number of electric batteries had been purchased in London, and when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother’s hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong, that he nearly knocked him off his feet in giving him the hand of fellowship. When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength.

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None of the tribal leaders fully understood that they were ceding authority of their lands to the AIC, and they certainly could not read the language in which the agreement was written. Nevertheless, Leopold had what he needed to make the case that the Congo was his at an imperialist extravaganza called the Berlin Conference.

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Leopold dissolved the AIC, and on May 29, 1885, he declared himself to be the personal owner and king sovereign of the Congo-Vrijstaat—the Congo Free State. His new patch of personal property in Africa was seventy-six times the size of Belgium.

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COLONIZATION: 1885–1960

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Just as the DRC is blessed with the world’s largest cobalt reserves needed to meet demand for today’s electric vehicle revolution, so too was Leopold’s Congo blessed with millions of square kilometers of rubber trees needed to meet demand for the first automobile revolution.

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They kidnapped the wives and children of village men and ordered them to meet a quota of three to four kilos of rubber sap per fortnight. If they returned from the forest without meeting their quotas, the hands, noses, or ears of their loved ones were chopped off.

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Rubber prices began to collapse on the world market, and the Belgians were wringing their fingers over how to keep the colony profitable. In the nick of time, they discovered Katanga’s mineral deposits.

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Following Leopold’s model, the Lever brothers used forced labor in the extraction of palm oil under a quota system. The riches they generated helped build the multinational powerhouse Unilever.

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Protests for independence escalated in the Belgian Congo during the late 1950s, led by a meteoric nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba.

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HOPE BORN AND DESTROYED: 1958–JANUARY 1961

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Eleven days after independence, the Belgians executed a brazen plan to keep control of what mattered most in the Congo—the minerals of Katanga.

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With surgical precision, the Belgians had severed Katanga Province like a hand from the body of the nation, and with it, 70 percent of the government’s income. The country was crippled before it ever had a chance.

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The possibility that the Congo, and especially Katanga, might come under Soviet influence put the United States, the United Nations, and Belgium into overdrive to dispatch Lumumba.

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The CIA hatched a plot to assassinate Lumumba using toothpaste poisoned with cobra venom; they settled instead on a plan to recruit Lumumba’s friend and the head of the army, Joseph Mobutu, to overthrow him.

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On September 14, 1960, Joseph Mobutu announced that he had seized control of the government. Mobutu had the army behind him, as well as the logistical and financial backing of the United States, United Nations, and Belgium.

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Patrice Lumumba was flown to Élisabethville on January 16, 1961, driven to an isolated mansion, and tortured by six Belgians and six Katangans, including Moise Tshombe and his second in command, Godefroid Munongo. In an ironic twist of history, Munongo was the grandson of King Msiri. In 1891, Belgian mercenaries dispatched by Leopold had assassinated Msiri to take control of Katanga, and exactly seventy years later, Msiri’s grandson joined with the Belgians to assassinate Lumumba and hand Katanga back to the Belgians.

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HELL ON EARTH: FEBRUARY 1961–2022

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the United Nations sent troops to force Katanga to reunify with the Republic of Congo, which is all Lumumba ever wanted.

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President Kennedy sent U.S. fighter jets to support a decisive UN offensive. Tshombe conceded defeat on January 14, 1963. The Congo was finally reunified after three and a half years of fractious violence, and new elections were held in May 1965 with Kasa-Vubu emerging as president. Kasa-Vubu’s presidency was short-lived—on November 24, 1965, Joseph Mobutu executed his second coup and took complete control of the government.

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Mobutu ran the Congo for thirty-two years, just as Leopold did—a personal wealth machine.

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Mobutu remained in power for decades, despite overt corruption, by embracing the U.S. cause against communism, which brought him the unwavering support of Presidents Nixon, Bush, Reagan, and Clinton.

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When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mobutu’s value to the West collapsed with it. A genocide in neighboring Rwanda proved to be the catalyst for his final downfall.

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On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu) of Rwanda was shot down on approach to Kigali International Airport. Hutus blamed Tutsis, and a massacre erupted. After one hundred days, Hutu Interahamwe had slaughtered at least eight hundred thousand Tutsis. More than two million refugees fled across Zaire’s borders into the Kivus.

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The degeneration of Zaire under Mobutu made it possible for its comparatively diminutive neighbors to contemplate an invasion.

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A decrepit Mobutu fled to Morocco, where he eventually died in exile. Kabila was sworn in as president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on May 29, 1997. He portrayed himself as the rightful successor to Patrice Lumumba and promised to bring freedom and prosperity to the Congolese people.

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Laurent Kabila ran the Congo as a kleptocratic system of personal enrichment.

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What followed on August 2, 1998, and for years thereafter became known as “Africa’s Great War,” an internecine explosion of violence involving nine African nations and thirty militias that laid waste to the DRC and resulted in the death of at least five million Congolese civilians.

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War raged for two years before the UN sent peacekeepers to stabilize the situation. Laurent Kabila was assassinated by one of his bodyguards on January 16, 2001. Kabila’s son, Joseph, succeeded him and inherited a country in ruins. In a bid to jump-start the nation’s economy, Joseph Kabila resuscitated the country’s mining sector under a new Mining Code in 2002 that was designed to attract foreign investment.

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He secured the SICOMINES deal in 2009, which opened the doors for a Chinese takeover of Katanga. Kabila brokered several other deals with Chinese mining companies in exchange for kickbacks funneled through his accounts at BGFIBank.

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Kabila’s second term as president ended in December 2016, although he clung to power for two more years before elections were finally held on December 30, 2018. Kabila’s handpicked successor, Félix Tshisekedi, was declared the winner. Despite questions about the credibility of the results, Tshisekedi’s inauguration on January 25, 2019, marked the first peaceful transfer of power in the Congo since the country’s independence in 1960.

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Tshisekedi continues to apply pressure to Chinese mining companies to improve transparency, labor standards, and sustainability practices. Displeased with Tshisekedi’s actions, Kabila is said to be scheming with Chinese backers to run again in the 2023 elections to retake control of the country, or to ensure the victory of someone else who will support their agenda.

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From the moment Diego Cão introduced Europeans to the Kongo in 1482, the heart of Africa was made colony to the world. Patrice Lumumba offered a fleeting chance at a different fate, but the neocolonial machinery of the West chopped him down and replaced him with someone who would keep their riches flowing. Cobalt is but the latest treasure they have come to loot.

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“If We Do Not Dig, We Do Not Eat” Tenke Fungurume, Mutanda, and Tilwezembe This realization of a great human tragedy will be vivid and historically enduring in the measure in which we are able to fashion for ourselves a mental vision, which shall also be an accurate one, of its victims. — E. D. Morel, History of the Congo Reform Movement

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Corporations atop the cobalt chain stake their reputations on the impervious wall that is supposed to exist between industrial and artisanal production. Such assertions are as meaningless as trying to claim that one can discriminate the water from different tributaries while standing at the mouth of the Congo River.

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TENKE FUNGURUME

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Thousands of people once lived in villages across the concession, but they were evicted when the rights were sold in 2006 to a joint venture between the U.S. mining company Phelps Dodge (57.75 percent), Tenke Mining Company (24.75 percent), and Gécamines (17.5 percent).

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In 2016, Freeport sold its stake in TFM to China Molybdenum (CMOC) for $2.65 billion. The sale ended the presence of any U.S.-based mining companies in the DRC and cleared the way for the Chinese takeover of the Congo’s copper-cobalt mines.

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TFM produced an impressive 15,700 tons of cobalt in 2021,1 although the Congolese government formally charged CMOC in February 2022 with understating production in order to minimize its tax and royalty payments.2

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According to locals, much of the ore is sold from the depots right back to CMOC.

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One of my translators, Olivier, described the situation best: Imagine if a mining company came to the place where you live and they kick you out. They destroy all your belongings except whatever you can carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers. What can you do if there is no one to help you? Maybe you would feel it is your right to go back to that place where you lived and dig some of the minerals for yourself. That is how the people in Fungurume feel.

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“There were always illegal miners, mainly on hills that were not active mining zones. We would have waves that would come into active mining zones. We had an uneasy truce.

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Given his knowledge of the processing facility, Kafufu was able to explain how the system worked: “First, they take the ores to the crushing plant for milling. They have metal rollers as big as a car that can crush the ores like sand. After this, they leach the sand using sulfuric acid to separate the copper and the cobalt. This makes some gas that is filled with hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid.” The problem, according to Kafufu, was that CMOC did not contain the gas. “They let it blow over our homes. It falls on our food and our water. It falls on everyone who lives here,” he said.