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

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. Clean air and water feel like a crime. The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent. Most of it was built on violence, neatly tucked away in history books that sanitize the truth.

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.

The Chinese pay billions to the government, and the politicians close their eyes. Organizations like IDAK [Sustainable Investment in Katanga] and other civil society organizations are allowed to exist only to show they exist.

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.

Samples of dust taken inside homes in the Copper Belt had an average of 170mg lead...the EPA recommends a max safe limit of 40mg inside homes. Levels as high as 170mg can cause neurological damage, muscle and joint pain, headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, and reduced fertility in adults. In children, lead poisoning can cause irreversible developmental damage as well as weight loss, vomiting, and seizures.

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.