By Siddharth Kara -January 31, 2023 - 288 Page
This powerful account of how and why cobalt especially along with other minerals like uranium found almost exclusively in the Congo brought great misery to millions of Congo residents and great wealth to international corporations like Apple and Tesla will shock anyone of integrity who reads it.
Cobalt is an essential ingredient in rechargeable lithium batteries that power tablets, smart phones and electric vehicles. Billions of people depend on these devices, I am writing this on a tablet.Lithium batters helped make Apple the most valuable brand in the world, Elton Musk incredibly wealth, and are behind Kamala Harris's visit to Africa and China 's huge investments there. All this depends on mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kara details profusely Chinese control of Cobalt mining.
Kara vividly details the horrid lives of miners in the Congo. He provides a brief history of European exploitation of the resources of the Congo.
From the start of the Slave trade, King Leopold's rule over rubber which lead to millions of deaths, up to post colonial leadership of the country Kara shows us a cruel history
Miners make about $2.00 at most under terrible totally unsafe conditions. The air and the water are horrifyingly unsafe. Health care is nonexistent. Miners are watched over by armed guards. Mining companies pay huge bribes to Congo officials. Middlemen exploit miners, child labor is supposed to be illegal but Kara says under seven work in dangerous mines. People are so desperate and scared of armed guards, government forces they flock from all over to the mines. Injuries and respiratory illness are common place. Girls get pregnant in their middle teens and work with their babies strapped on their backs. Prostitution is an alternative taken by many women.
Kara tells us most Congolese are fervent Catholics, escapism for them.
Rich foreign corporations state they do not deal with any suppliers who use children as miners or provide unsafe working conditions. Kara says never in his extensive close up visits to mining areas did he ever see an inspector from these companies.
Kara describes his conversations with miners, with women left alone after their husbands death, with a teenage boy left crippled for life in a mining accident, with officials who gave him life saving stamp of approvals to visit mines. He describes in detail the huge mines and the work of miners. Millions of trees have been cut for mines.
"The path begins with accountability. The biggest problem faced by the Congo’s artisanal miners is not the gun-toting soldiers, unscrupulous Chinese buyers, exploitative mining cooperatives, or collapsing tunnels. These and other antagonists are but symptoms of a greater menace . The biggest problem faced by the Congo’s artisanal miners is that stakeholders up the chain refuse to accept responsibility for them, even though they all profit in one way or another from their work. Rather than issue vacant statements on
zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR, corporations should do the one, simple thing that would truly help: treat the artisanal miners as equal employees to the people who work at corporate headquarters. We would not send the children of Cupertino to scrounge for cobalt in toxic pits, so why is it permissible to send the children of the Congo? We would not accept blanket press statements about how those children were being treated without independently verifying it, so why don’t we do it in the Congo? We would not treat ourhometowns like toxic dumping grounds, so why do we allow it in the Congo? If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal miners would be done." From the Epilogue
He is a British Academy Global Professor and an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University. Kara has authored three books on modern slavery and won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Kara's first book was adapted into a Hollywood film, Trafficked. A feature film inspired by Cobalt Red is currently in preproduction. He divides his time between the U.K. and the US.
Mel Ulm
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