Part I: Beneath The Surface – Congo’s Cobalt Curse
Every device in your hand – your phone, your laptop, your electric car – is powered by a silent tragedy. Its heart, the lithium-ion battery, depends on a metal that flows from the depths of the earth in one of the most tormented places on the planet: the southeastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the mines of the Copperbelt, the future is being torn from the earth by the hands of children. And the cost of our progress is paid in blood, bone, and breath.
The New Colonial Rush
Once it was ivory. Then rubber. Then diamonds. Now it’s cobalt. The cycle of plunder has never truly ended – only changed shape.
Beneath Congo’s red soil lies the world’s richest deposit of cobalt, along with copper, gold, uranium, and lithium – materials essential for powering the “green” technologies that promise a cleaner future for the global North. But beneath the talk of carbon neutrality and clean energy lies an old pattern: extract the wealth of Africa, leave nothing behind but scars.
In the scramble for these critical minerals, history repeats itself. Centuries of colonial extraction taught the world how to strip this land bare. Now, multinationals and their silent partners have perfected the practice. In towns built on the ghosts of plantations and colonial railroads, a new kind of empire has taken root – one that speaks the language of sustainability while grinding Congolese lives into dust.
The Ghost Economy of the Digging Poor
They are called diggers. Creuseurs. Tens of thousands of them. With no machines, no protection, and no rights, they tunnel into the earth with shovels and picks, hunting for heterogenite – the cobalt-bearing ore that powers the 21st century.
Only a handful of zones have been officially designated for artisanal mining, but the number of miners far exceeds what’s allowed. So they dig wherever they can – on private land, near industrial mines, even on toxic waste heaps – often under the watchful eyes of militias, soldiers, or corrupt police units.
What they find is sold to middlemen, who sell it to purchasing houses, who in turn sell it to processing plants that pretend not to know – or not to care – where it came from. Once the ore crosses that invisible line into the formal supply chain, it’s indistinguishable from “clean” cobalt.
This is the hidden engine behind every battery. A sprawling gray zone of child labor, brutal exploitation, and systemic invisibility.
The artisanal mining industry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is rife with forced and child labor, unreported deaths and human rights abuses, writes academic and modern slavery researcher Siddharth Kara in his new book Cobalt Red
Children of the Pit
Some of the workers are as young as five. Some were kidnapped from villages and trafficked across provinces. Some are orphans, living in plastic huts, cooking beans over firewood in fields polluted by sulfuric acid. They haul sacks heavier than their own bodies. They work in barefoot silence, exposed to uranium, arsenic, and cobalt dust.
There are no schools, no doctors, no clean water. Just holes in the ground and the promise of a few dollars a day.
One child collected stones in streams laced with heavy metals. Another spoke of the long road from a northern village to a cobalt mine where armed men forced him to work. He escaped, but many don’t. Many die nameless, buried in the hills, forgotten.
In one mine, a boy slipped and hit his head. He was dead before help could arrive. His body was taken away quietly. No report. No justice. No compensation. Just another lost life in the machine of modernity.
There are thousands of such examples.
A Nation Poisoned
Toxic air. Poisoned water. Dead rivers. The people who live near the mines are breathing, drinking, and eating contamination.
Studies show the bodies of local residents, even those not working in the mines, carry trace metals at levels dozens of times higher than safe limits. Cobalt, lead, cadmium, uranium, chromium – the alphabet of industrial death has settled into their blood, their bones, their babies.
Birth defects are rising. Miscarriages are common. Children born near the mines suffer from stunted growth, neurological disorders, respiratory failure. But the healthcare system cannot cope. Doctors are untrained, clinics are nonexistent, and specialists are nowhere to be found.
Still the digging continues.
Corporate Lies and the Theater of Compliance
The corporations know. They know what cobalt is. They know where it comes from. They know the truth behind their “supply chain transparency” reports and their “zero-tolerance” press releases.
They say they audit. They say they monitor. They say they fight child labor.
But on the ground, nothing changes.
No protection, no oversight, no ethical mining. Just a never-ending chain of profit stretched from the bleeding heart of Africa to the glowing screens of the West.
The truth is simple: the line between artisanal and industrial cobalt is a fiction. The system is built on blending the two, feeding suffering into the engine of modern life.
The Hidden Price of Power
This is what powers your future.
This is the human toll behind the batteries of a “sustainable” world.
Not clean energy. Not progress. But a new form of invisible colonialism – fueled by poverty, enforced by silence, and hidden behind corporate walls.
The children in the mines are not part of some distant, tragic footnote. They are the first link in the chain of everything we call innovation.
As long as that chain remains unbroken, every charged device is a quiet endorsement of their suffering.
In Congo, beneath the surface of green dreams, the earth bleeds cobalt – and the world looks away.
This is only the beginning. The second part of “Cobalt Blood” will be published soon — and it will uncover even deeper layers of truth the world chooses not to see. Subscribe to the newsletter below to stay updated on the publication.
P.S. Current article is inspired by the Siddharth Kara book: “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives”