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

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.

The devastated landscape resembled a battlefield after an aerial bombardment. The survivors of the day’s assault clambered out of the craters to catch what little rest they could before enduring the ordeal all over again the next day. 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.

Women were always paid less than men for the same sack of cobalt.

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.

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.

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.”