Kat Gale’s Reviews > Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives > Status Update

Sexual assault was a scourge in almost every artisanal mining area I visited. 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.

Ore transportation fees seemed little more than a money grab by the government...The fees made it impossible for most artisanal miners to access markets directly due to their inability to pay the tax. 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.

The road from Lumbubashi to Kipushi is the primary route of export for cobalt & other minerals from the DRC. The road was in good condition until 1997 when Kabila and his Rwanda-Uganda-backed army invaded& shelled the road. In 2010, a Chinese consortium repaved the road as part of an agreement brokered by Kabila, through which China managed to corner most of the global cobalt market before anyone knew what happened.

"All the mining companies treat the Congolese people like slaves,” Gloria said. “They think because our people are poor, they can be humiliated.”
“All Africans are poor in their eyes. They steal our resources to keep us poor!” Joseph exclaimed.
“When you see what the mining companies have done to our forests and rivers, your heart will cry,” Reine added.

Displacement of the native population due to mine expansion is a major crisis in the mining provinces. 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...“Eventually, there will be no place left in Congo for Congolese people".

“They pay us so little,” said Makaza, a man from the nearby village of Mukwemba. “They take all our minerals, but they do not support the communities who live here.”

There are bad actors at every link, but the chain wouldn't exist were it not for the demand for cobalt created by the companies at the top. It's there,& only there, where solutions must begin. Those solutions will only have meaning if the fictions promulgated by corporate stakeholders about the conditions under which cobalt is mined in the Congo are replaced by the realities experienced by the miners themselves.

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.

Of all the tragedies that have afflicted the Congo, perhaps the greatest of all is the fact that the suffering taking place in the mining provinces is entirely preventable. But why fix a problem if no one thinks it exists? Most people don’t 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.

Belgium, the UN, the US, & the neocolonial interests they represented rejected Lumumba’s vision [the 1st democratic leader of Congo], conspired to assassinate him, and propped up a violent dictator, Joseph Mobatu, in his place. For 32 years, Mobutu supported the Western agenda, kept Katanga’s minerals flowing in their direction, and enriched himself just as egregiously as the colonizers who came before him.