Reading about mine collapses and children dying got to be almost too much at times, and yet, I could not stop listening. Imagine a giant ball of clay pinched at two ends—southwest from Kinshasa to the ocean, and southeast in a terrestrial peninsula that traces the Copper Belt. The way the system is setup is to exploit every citizen in the Congo so they will have no other choice but to mine.

The Katanga region in the southeastern corner of the Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.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. There are many episodes in the history of the Congo that are bloodier than what is happening in the mining sector today, but none of these episodes ever involved so much suffering for so much profit linked so indispensably to the lives of billions of people around the world.

I admire them simply because they did what they needed to do to get the truth to the masses, no matter what [ and some of that is covered in the acknowledgements and notes at the end. 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. The book clearly shows what business like Apple, Google, Samsung, Dell, and GM (just to name a few) do to cover up their involvement to child labor and preparatory business practices. It also gives a lot of insight into other cultures and ways of life completely alien to those of us who live in first-world countries and puts into perspective how fortunate we are to have been born in one of the richer countries in the world. Aluminum, tin, nickel, and other metals were used in thousands of industrial and consumer applications.

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? I am writing this review on my laptop with a rechargeable battery, looking at my tablet with a rechargeable battery. As the world continues to embrace the net zero agenda and becomes ever more dependent on personal electronic devices and new technologies, this compelling book paints a dire portrait of the conditions under which a crucial natural resource is extracted. D. Morel, wrote that the Congo Free State was “a perfected system of oppression, accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for the vast destruction of human life. At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefited in any meaningful way from the monetization of their country’s resources.

During the Iron Age, iron ore was mined and smelted into steel, which was used to fashion more powerful tools and weapons. The conditions in the mines are brutal, the book features heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story of gruesome injuries occurring often times to children.Joseph Conrad immortalized the evil of Leopold’s Congo Free State in Heart of Darkness (1899) with four words—“The horror! These procedures are especially important in the Congo, where the dangers of speaking to outsiders cannot be overstated. It is horrific in the extreme, and all so that we Westerners and many Asians can have cheap battery-powered devices.

These guides assisted me in gaining access to scores of mining sites, as well as the people who toiled at them. His reporting on how the dangerous, ill-paid labor of Congo children provides a mineral essential to our cellphones will break your heart. That is because the Congo enjoys rock with a staggering concentration of cobalt, with some of the rock (Heterogenite) containing up to 20% purity in some places. Though all the big companies (Samsung, Apple, Tesla, etc) proudly claim there is no child labor in the cobalt they use, nothing is done to ensure it.I use the words rule and reign because Mobutu and the Kabilas ran the country like despots, enriching themselves on the nation’s mineral resources while leaving their people to languish. The mines in Congo represent a hierarchy of exploitation from every level to the top where the level below is exploited by the level above in a long series of steps in its supply chain. The Bronze Age was born, and the advent of metalworking sparked rapid advancements in human civilization. The global cobalt supply chain is the mechanism that transforms the dollar-a-day wages of the Congo’s artisanal miners into multibillion-dollar quarterly profits at the top of the chain.