Siddharth Kara > Quotes

“Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“Now you understand how people like us work?”
“I believe so.”
“Tell me.”
“You work in horrible conditions and—”
“No! We work in our graves.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“               The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, second inaugural address, 1937”
― Siddharth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“Please tell the people in your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“It is tempting to point the finger at local actors as the agents of the carnage---be it corrupt politicians, exploitive cooperatives, unhinged soldiers, or extortionist bosses. The all played their roles, but they were also symptoms of a more malevolent disease: the global economy run amok in Africa. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result. —Mahatma Gandhi”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“The system was opaque and untraceable by design.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“This was the final truth of cobalt mining in the Congo: the life of a child buried alive while digging for cobalt counted for nothing. All the dead here counted for nothing. The loot is all.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“I understood at last how the people of the Congo survived their daily torment—they loved God with full and fiery hearts and drew comfort from the promise of salvation. Although their love was powerful, the evidence was mounting that it was all but unrequited.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“The essence of Kasulo is a devils' gamble: tunnel diggers risk their lives for the prospects of riches. Mind you, the "richest" income I documented in Kasulo was an average take home-pay of $7 per day. There are spikes to $12 or even $15 when a particularly rich vein of heterogenite is found. That is the lotto ticket everyone is after. The most fortunate tunnel diggers in Kasulo earn around $3,000 per year. By way of comparison, the CEOs of the technology and car companies that buy the cobalt mined from Kasulo earn $3,000 in an hour, and they do so without having to put their lives at risk each day that they go to work.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“Although most Americans do not realise it, their nations agricultural system has relied heavily on migrant labourers and slaves from Africa, Asia and south of the border for the last four centuries. The country’s agricultural sector has functioned to varying degrees on bondage and servitude from the beginning, which is no different fro agricultural sectors elsewhere in the world. From feudal times to the present day, the arrangements that characterise agricultural work have been remarkably resistant to change, including in the United States. Laws are passed, awareness is raised, workers protest, and lives are lost - but trafficking for slavery and bondage in America’s agricultural sector remains far more prevalent today than almost anyone cares to admit.”
― Siddharth Kara

“Labor is valued by the penny, life hardly at all.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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. Cobalt mining is the latest in a long history of “enormous and atrocious” lies that have tormented the people of the Congo.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“1990, twenty-three million East Europeans lived on less than $2 per day;27 by 2001 that number had grown to ninety-three million, or one out of four people in the region.28”
― Siddharth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“They reported that children were typically paid roughly two dollars a day regardless of production and that they received little to no assistance when they suffered injuries. The diggers at Tilwezembe described hazardous conditions and harsh reprisals if they did not obey their bosses. Some were locked inside a shipping container called a cachot (“dungeon”) without food or water for up to two days.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“Elodie was orphaned by cobalt mining. She said her father died in a tunnel collapse at the KCC site in August 2017. I could not find any public reports of the collapse, although others in Kapata remembered it. Elodie’s mother had died around a year before her father. She washed stones at Lake Malo, and as best as Elodie could recall, her mother contracted an infection from which she was unable to recover. After the loss of her parents, Elodie said she turned to prostitution to survive. Soldiers and artisanal miners purchased her regularly. “The men in Congo hate women,” she said. “They beat us and laugh.” Elodie became pregnant. After her son was born, she started digging at Lake Malo. She said that prostitution and digging for cobalt were the same—“Muango yangu njoo soko.” My body is my marketplace. Elodie slept in an abandoned, half-finished brick hut near the southern edge of Kapata with a group of orphaned children. The children were known as shegués, a word derived from”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“Elodie was one of the most brutalized children I met in the DRC. She had been thrown to a pack of wolves by a system of such merciless calculation that it somehow managed to transform her degradation into shiny gadgets and cars sold around the world.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“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.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“John Newton might be one of the few who did manage to escape. After a successful slaving career, Newton became a prominent evangelical preacher, author of one of the most famous Christian hymns, “Amazing Grace,” and, eventually, a leading voice against the slave trade.”
― Siddharth Kara, The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery